I couldn’t choose which of these two booze-related issues to write about for this week’s Wine Wednesday. So let’s discuss them both!
1. The LCBO’s new bottle-weight restrictions
I couldn’t hold back an audible groan when I read on Dr. Vino’s Wine Blog that the LCBO has decided that (as of 2013) it will not carry any sub-$15 wine that has a bottle weighing more than 420 grams. For comparison’s sake, the wine itself weighs around 750 grams and most bottles currently weigh over 500 grams.
Let me be clear: I am a big fan of reducing the carbon footprint of wine (remember that time I tried to find a good wine in a box?). One of my favorite things about my LCBO fave Obikwa Shiraz is the new lightweight bottle. But I am annoyed that this new LCBO rule has only been applied to wines that cost less than $15. I worry that the new rule will only reinforce consumers’ impressions that wines in heavy bottles are luxurious and superior and will actually decrease incentives for higher-end producers to make the switch.
Furthermore, while I do anticipate that large distributors will adjust their bottling accordingly, in the short term I think this will have a negative impact on consumer choice in Ontario as smaller producers decide it’s not worth the trouble to meet the LCBO’s criteria and either raise their prices or pull their wines from the shelves. And frankly, it’s already hard enough to find decent sub-$15 wines at the LCBO. So in conclusion: blergh.
2. SERIOUS Beer vs. Light Beer: Beerpocalypse 2011!
I was fascinated by the comments that followed last week’s Ask Team Practical column over at A Practical Wedding. The conflict between a bride and groom who described themselves as “SERIOUS beer drinkers” and the bride’s father, who was insisting on adding a case of light beer to the bar because that’s what his family drinks, drew impassioned comments from both sides. Some insisted that the father-in-law was being meddlesome and that the “crappy” beer drinkers should just try the better brews selected by the bride and groom. Others said the groom (who is standing firm against the addition of light beer) was being a snob and should just agree to the light beer in order to be a good host.
Our beer and wine selection (minus one Côtes du Rhône). Photo by David Wegwart of Photocraftz.
In a way I did sympathize with the beer-loving groom. First off, although I do not consider myself to be very beer-knowledgeable, I also hate light beer. Bud Light is on my list of the Top 5 Most Disgusting Things I’ve Ever Tasted (just below glorified rice).+ Second, the alcohol selection was important to us at our wedding too. My husband and I put a lot of thought into the wines we served. If my family had insisted that my aunts and uncles could not find anything appealing on our wine list and would only drink white zinfandel, I would have been a little annoyed that they wouldn’t even try the wines we had so carefully chosen. There is such a thing as accepting hospitality graciously, which sometimes means that you try something new and/or find a way to cope without the exact type of booze that you would have personally selected at the liquor store.
But you know what? If family members wanted the white zin so badly that they offered to add it to our bar at their own expense, I would have said yes.* Preventing people from drinking a wine I dislike is not worth a knock-down drag-out fight with family. That’s not the hill I’d want to die on. Heck, it’s not even in the same mountain range as the hill I’d want to die on.
Any thoughts on the LCBO’s new rule? What was your take on the beer throwdown?
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+ Edited to add: There’s sort of a story here. At one of the first college parties I attended, a very drunk guy with serious alcohol-related BO and the worst breath on the planet started chatting up me and my friends and he would. not. leave. us. alone. The next time I tasted light beer I thought, “this tastes the way Gary smells!” (I think his name was Gary. Or Gerald. Or possibly Mortimer. It was hard to tell through the slurring.) That impression has endured.
* If my family was trying dictate how we spent *our* money, that strikes me as a slightly different issue.
Honestly, I say this as someone who is obviously in the thick of beer snobbery, but anyone who genuinely can’t be in the same room as “light beer” (I just read that post for the first time), is being snooty to prove a point. Get some other marker for your identity, you brat. Do whatever you want with your money, but I do think part of hosting is trying, within reason, to ensure that your guests are taken care of. My husband has regularly brought home beer he himself thinks is pretty crappy because he knew our guests liked that kind of beer (I am thinking of his brother, in particular here). We are all allowed to like what we like but I have no patience for this kind of snobbery. Even the tone of the letter, referring to oneself as a “serious beer drinker” makes me cringe in embarrassment for the person.
(A side point that G. always points out is that the mark of a beer snob who is all talk and no knowledge is someone who just worships craft beer and sneers at mass-produced beer indiscriminately. As he’s pointed out, whether or not we like the flavours of mass-produced beer–and I myself won’t touch the stuff–a lot of it is very, very well made from a brewing perspective, and certainly does not deserve to be sneered at. He definitely thinks a lot of this snobbery is about class, and if you read craft brewing industry magazines, their “profile” of their market is so sneering it’s appalling.)
Re: the LCBO–this is crazy! I agree with you and think it’s especially egregious to put the price cap on this! That is obnoxious and weirdly punishing the “normal” purchasers…
From an old-ish New Yorker article about “extreme beer”:
I asked [Orval's] brewmaster, Jean-Marie Rock, which American beer he likes best. He thought for a moment, squinting down his bladelike nose, and narrowed his lips to a point. Then he raised a finger in the air. “Budweiser!” he said. “Tell them that the brewer at Orval likes Budweiser!” He smiled. “I know they detest it, but it is quite good.”
If the groom is such a bedwetter that he can’t stand to be in the same room as light beer, somebody had better check his ID because he isn’t old enough to legally drink it.
Anna — they’re not just “serious beer drinkers,” they are “SERIOUS beer drinkers.” Note the caps. As you say, we’re all allowed to like what we like — and that includes the people who like white zinfandel and light beer. To quote Tina Fey: “It is an impressively arrogant move to conclude that because you don’t like something, it is empirically not good.”
Graeme, that New Yorker article was fascinating! It’s interesting to me how hostile Sam Calagione was to Budweiser (despite what the Trappist monk thought). High-end winemakers are dismissive of things like Yellow Tail Shiraz but there’s not the same hostility towards its very existence. I wonder if that’s because most consumers already think wine is “serious” but brewers feel like their beverage doesn’t have the same level of respect among the average consumer? What do you think?
I think that’s certainly part of it, and “wine envy” is a well known phenomena in the craft beer world. Sam Calagione wrote a book about Dogfish Head where he talks about drawing inspiration from magazines like Wine Spectator rather than beer publications when he was starting his brewery because he wanted to associate his beer with a higher-end market (which is especially useful when you want to charge premium prices for a product that is extremely inexpensive to make). I don’t know about how the wine world works, but there’s a class politics aspect at play here in beer as well. Light beer is seen as lower class: think “Joe Six Pack” and so on, whereas craft beer is going for more of a middle to upper-class, educated, etc. consumer. You see a lot of derision in craft beer circles towards “lawnmower beer”–ie the sort of beer that you would drink after working up a sweat by, say, mowing the lawn or working a blue collar job–as if it’s a bad thing in itself that you would want to drink a beer that simply quenches your thirst. Which isn’t to say that I have a great love for the Budweisers and Millers of this world, because I don’t, but there is a lot of pretentiousness and snobbery in the craft beer world.
There’s definitely more than enough snobbery to go around in the wine world too! But I think high-end winemakers see mass-produced wines as a pale imitation of what they’ve been doing for centuries, rather than as a competitor that threatens the desired image of their product. In a way they don’t even see it as the same sort of product; they might as well get worked up about the existence of grape juice or Pepsi.
It’s been my impression that high-end Bordeaux drinkers are actually much more hostile to high-end Napa cabernet and vice versa — people get really worked up about Old World wines being replaced by “high-alcohol fruity crap” or about New World wines not getting enough “respect.”
I think you are spot on–craft beer has a massive inferiority complex to wine (Graeme has read/thought a lot about this one) and it definitely makes for more juvenile aesthetic politics. Wine is such an established industry that one may not be into Yellow Tail shiraz, but I get the impression that the high end wine folks just… ignore it? Rather than acting as though it offends their very existence?
I’m going to emphatically agree with what’s already been said, since I bit my tongue through the original APW discussion. The groom in this case is being a jerk, and being such a monumental jerk that I’m tempted to suspect it’s not about beer at all, but rather about a more general disdain for his in-laws-to-be. I mean, I like my craft beer, and I’ve given up on trying to protest when someone accuses me of snobbery, but what the hell does it matter if the liquid in someone else’s glass, which I am not drinking, is not something I would choose to drink? Seriously.
And the LCBO wine selection is already a major factor behind my appreciation for Ontario beers. The Niagara region whites are nice, though, and I would assume that Ontario producers will fall in line with the new policy.
I’m glad I’m not the only one who has found the LCBO wine selection a bit lacking! My Scotch and whisky collection has been growing in Canada. I should branch out to beer too. Any good Ontario beers to recommend?
Beau’s!
I was a little floored by the batshit comments on that post, to be honest. Seriously? Get off your high horse. My FIL drinks shit beer, and we just make fun of him for it. But we buy it for him, because that’s what he likes. It’s hospitality, in my opinion. Also, someone needs to pull the (hand-crafted microbrewed) beer bottle out of that SERIOUS beer drinker’s ass.
Ahhh, the Beerpocalypse.
Honestly, I have no problem with drinking what you want to drink. I also think that at a party, you should serve what you want to serve. On my third (nonexistent) hand, I think that if someone is willing to go the extra mile and pay/supply what they want to feel comfortable, then why on earth wouldn’t you let them?!? I’m pretty sure that if their beer was stored behind the bar like all of the other drinks, it’s not as if anyone (hosts included) would be able to *sense* that it’s in the room.
Seriously. You don’t have to drink the light beer yourselves, but to make an issue because someone else wants to drink it is total groomzilla jerkitude (and, yes, that’s a technical term). And it’s not like there aren’t some beautiful microbrewed light beers out there (I don’t drink them, but they look good).
For me it was just a matter of: do you want to make sure everyone drinks (sometimes a component of them dancing and having fun) or are you okay if a decent number of people don’t drink because you didn’t serve things they like? We wanted the first, so we served more accessible beer and sweeter wines than we usually drink. But it was all gone at the end and we had a raging dance party. You have to think of the net result, in my opinion. We’re enjoying our fancy beer and wine on the honeymoon.
I got so pissed off about that APW column. I didn’t jump in because the comment section was nearly as ridiculous. However, I am someone who actually DID compromise on the beer, wine, and prosecco because the wedding *wasn’t about me.* Did I love all our beer options? No. But we provided three beers – including Heineken (ew) – so everyone could find something they liked. And as for the prosecco we had… I had been emphatically against a champagne toast because I think they’re wasteful (no one drinks the crap champagne I could afford and you have to rent special glasses). However, my mother had a FIT. She desperately wanted prosecco, apparently. So I bought half a case and put it behind the bar for her. It made her happy.
You make compromises because its the mark of a good host. Having watery beer and prosecco didn’t remotely inhibit my enjoyment of our our amazing wine and sangria. You really need to grow a backbone and an ounce of internal self-confidence if you think booze choices are self-definitional.
The first wine tasting I ever enjoyed was at a totally non-pretentious vineyard. I asked for a recommendation and they said they couldn’t give us one – everyone likes what they like. Whatever I liked, was right for me. And suddenly, I enjoyed learning about wine. (Incidentally, this vineyard is genuinely great. It’s the best in the Temecula Valley and they sell most of their grapes to high-end Napa wineries. If they can get over snobbery, we can too.)
Also, as a side note, your wedding red is one of my all time affordable favorites.
Becca, I think this is exactly what was missing from the conversation: the wedding is not just about the bride and groom. It is also about their families and their guests.
Obviously, there’s only so much you can do to anticipate what guests will want or like. I was convinced that our guests would miss vodka cocktails if they weren’t offered and bought 3 liters of vodka. At the end of the night, we still had almost 3 liters of vodka. And if someone came up to the bride and groom *at the wedding* and said “where’s the light beer? I can’t believe you didn’t buy light beer!” that person would be a jerk.
But if you know certain family members drink light beer, and your parents really want to make that available to them, what’s the big deal with saying “ok, get some Bud Light”? Pro: your parents will appreciate the gesture, your uncles will be able to keep to their diets, and maybe a couple other guests will end up wanting the light beer too. Con: you will be in the same room as light beer. Doesn’t really seem to balance out.
[...] hinted at craft beer’s “wine envy” here and in comments here, and while this isn’t craft beer by any reasonable definition of the term, don’t we [...]