Beer tasting > wine tasting

A few months ago a charity in town had a beer tasting and it was great. Lots of local breweries and brewpubs as well as some national craft brews. So last night the same org had an event called something like "wines and beers of the world." Same thing but with wine too, I figured. Awesome!

Got there and it was a wine tasting with a single table for Miller Brewing Co. Meh. Now I know that there is a serious art to wine making, and my palate can detect the blueberry, tarragon, etc. notes in the wines, and I know that lots of people get really excited about good wine but I guess I'm just not one of them. I get excited over a finely crafted beer or a good Scotch but, for some reason, wine just does next to nothing for me.

Don't get me wrong, I like a glass of wine with a good dinner, but no wine/food pairing I've ever had is as memorable as the time a chef at a local restaurant made a beef and polenta dish specifically to be paired with Bell's Rye Stout. The pairing was perfect.

Whaddya think? I'm perfectly content with good beer and no wine but am I missing something?

You probably ARE missing something, but I am missing it too. I've never had a wine pairing sing to me like certain beer pairings, and I've drunken alot of wine, cider, etc.

I remember when I was getting back into beer (20yrs ago?) I had a MGD with a steak (That's right) It was perfect, I think it also has to do with timing as most beers have different flavours at different times, for me anyway.

Now I'll sit back and watch this thread go balistic.:rockin:

Meh. I am not a wine person. I don't go for the tart acidic flavors of wine and I don't care for tart or sour beer either. I don't think wine is all it's cracked up to be. Now I can drink a glass of crappy wine once in a while, but I rarely choose any of it over most ANY beer.

I split my drinking about 50/50 Beer/Wine. Love them both! In fact we are going to a food and wine pairing tonight. Beer is much easier to pair with food in my opinion. Lots of pairings work. It is trickier with wine. I've had plenty of good beer/food combos, but I've had some phenomenal wine/food pairings where both the food and the wine tasted even better together than either one alone. Plus there are lots of wines that are meant (designed) to be drunk with food, and frankly aren't terribly enjoyable by themselves. I've never had a beer like that.

Well, I do remember as a undergrad. 25+ yrs ago when I bought a 6er of Natty light. I could not drink it by itself. Being a poor student I wasn't going to throw it away so I had to take a sip,eat some pretzel, etc. Now, I'd just dump it out.

Many here lash out at BMC as unfit to drink. The reality is cheap beer is cheep tasting beer. It can be OK at times. Wine is no different. You get what you pay for. Sure there are some good values out there, same for beer. Then there are some high priced wines, that aren't worth it, same for beer. We would all come down on someone who tasted an IPA for the first time and didn't like it, and then said they will not try another. We would all say, try another one, they can be so different. We'd all congratulate ourselves when they report back a couple months later that they now love IPAs.

Well, the same works for wine

Good point, pjj2ba. I probably need to do a little more exploring. We just got a new wine bar in town where they have this fancy gadget that lets them pour 2oz samples without exposing the bottle to too much air ... or something. I don't quite understand it. Anyway, I should give that place another shot. The bartenders at my neighborhood craft brew pubs are so much more fun though.

For me it's really style dependent for wine and it has to be dry. I LOVE Cabernet Franc but of course it's hard to grow the grapes and you don't see much of it. I also like Riesling but it's hard to find dry examples of it (unless you're in the Finger Lakes region). I like merlot and baco noir and really good versions of most things... but in the end, it's just not as exciting as beer and to find a couple bottles of wine I want to purchase I typically have to taste at least 10 different wines and vintages. For that reason I almost never buy wine at the store, you have no idea what you're getting unless you've had it before. I buy a couple cases when I go on wine tours.

Another thing, wine tasting is more of a snobbish affair and beer tasting is simply more fun even when you're being snobbish about it. It's kinda stupid in some ways but makes sense to me in others... for some reason when you dislike a wine, you usually REALLY dislike it and it's hard to be nice about it, haha.

bovineblitz, nice highland here's my 2yo bull:

I like going on winery and brewery tours. Usually go on tours in the summer and will pick up a few bottles at each place. Don't drink much wine but I usually go for a pinot noir or yellowtail shiraz - can't go wrong with yellowtail IMO.

unionrdr said:

I saw a vid on youtube with this very amicable black guy that's some big honcho for a micro brewery. He had beers,food & wine as well as a wine expert. He got a lot of converts from wine folks that day.
The general consensus was that beer melds more with the flavors of the food. Wine just compliments it. good eye opener for many,including me.

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Garrett Oliver (Brooklyn Brewery)?

I'm not a huge wine guy but I like a good cabernet sauvignon. I've actually had one go perfectly with a NY strip steak at a restaurant. It was awesome. The downside is that times like that are few and far between, hence why I'm not that big into wine. It also requires such an attuned palate that the majority of people (of which I am one) can't taste/smell, let alone appreciate, the nuances of a lot of complex/fine wines.

I briefly started delving into wine appreciation about 5 years ago. Very briefly. It's very discouraging to buy a $60 bottle, discover it tastes like it's supposed, but I just don't care for it. And I know you can spend a lot more than that!

With beer, I can drop $20 on a bottle of Infinum, decide it's good but not worth the price, and I'm only out $20!

With brewing, I have wine making stuff I bought from a friend that made wine two years ago. I still haven't made wine. Why? It's hard enough for me to wait a few weeks for my beer to be ready (granted my pipeline has sucked the last year or so), I just can't bring myself to make something that might be ready in a year, and probably won't be "perfect" for two or three (I like big reds, mostly).

Luckily, my sister is into wine and I got her obsessed with wine making this Christmas. She's great at picking wines that I like (or that my mom likes, or dad likes, or other sister likes, etc.). I look forward to sampling her wares over years because I won't have to pay for them or watch them while I wait!

COLObrewer said:

bovineblitz, nice highland here's my 2yo bull:

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Wow, he is awesome, what a beast!