The taste of summers past

Andrew Jefford wishes that beer could catch the excitement of wine

I've spent the last few weeks filling my head with Burgundy. No, I'm not celebrating any sort of Lottery win, nor am I trying to drown sorrows in expense; it's simply that every wine year begins with Britain's merchants showing (and selling) the newest Burgundy vintage as it approaches its bottling date. This means, at the beginning of 2005, the 2003 vintage; 2004 will still need another year in casks.

Now 2003 is something special. This was the year when it was often hotter in Dijon in August than it was in Cairo; no living Burgundian could ever recall such heat (one set of researchers concluded that it was the hottest year since 1340).

The heat, indeed, killed thousands of elderly French men and women, left alone in the cities while those who customarily kept an eye on them fled to the coast. Burgundy lies in the middle of Eastern France, and the Continental weather pattern, which is the legacy of this position, means that when a heat wave strikes, Burgundy swelters. (Winters, correspondingly, are often bone-chillingly cold.)

Burgundy certainly baked in the summer of 2003. One local grower, Jean-Marie Fourrier, owns a second vineyard in Faugères in the Languedoc. Further south, according to Fourrier, the temperature exceeded 40°C (104°F) on only four days, while in Burgundy, it topped 40°C on no less than 17 days.

So were the resulting wines mind-blowing? Not necessarily. If heat was all that was needed for great wine, North Africa, the Arabian peninsula and Australia would long since have put the French and the Ger-mans out of business.

The 2003 white Burgundies, for example, are just too fat, too wide and too open to endure in time and unfold with the speckled yet vivid complexity we have come to love in Puligny-Montrachet or Chablis from a "normal" sort of good vintage.

The red wines are much better, but even so the heat was such that many of them are oddly constituted, with too much tough, bitter tannin for their own good. There are some gorgeous 2003 red Burgundies as well, of course, and these will, I suspect, turn out to be some of the greatest wines from this wine-growing region made during my lifetime or yours.

Not that either of us is ever likely to be in a position to buy them or to own them. My favourite wine of all those I tasted, La Romanée from Domaine Ligier-Belair, was on offer at £2,500 per case of 6 bottles. Add duty and VAT to that, and you fetch up with a wine that will cost about £495 a bottle. These are wines for the seriously rich.

There were also some good bottles at more reasonable prices, like the soft, rich, lush Bourgogne Rouge from Chevillon, which would end up at around £12.25 a bottle, but even so for most drinkers that's definitely into the special-treat category.

So why am I telling you this? Only because, as I made my way among the excited throng of tasters, and as I heard the vintage discussed time and time again, it struck me that this was precisely the kind of excitement the beer world needs.

Wine by its very nature is diverse and changeable, varying hugely from place to place and from vintage to vintage. (Wine brands, of course, do their best to iron out these differences, eliminating wine's most profound pleasures and excitements in the process, which is one reason why they are unlikely ever to dominate as they do the soap-powder or the breakfast-cereal worlds.)

Beer, by contrast, doesn't change much from season to season, and following the internationalisation of "lager" it doesn't necessarily change much from place to place either, as I discovered in both Holland and Turkey last year. So are there any beer equivalents of 2003 Burgundy?

Seasonal beers, of course, are one way of capturing something of this excitement, but in Britain they are very much the initiative of regional ale-lovers and microbrewers rather than the lager brewers whose products dominate the market. They reflect drinking needs more than the seasonal availability of ingredients: darker, stronger, maltier beers in the winter, and lighter, hoppier beers in the summer.

But brewery "house style" tends to dominate; sometimes, indeed, the pump clip itself seems to be the most clearly distinguished element of their make-up.

And that's about it: a gesture towards long-lost historical traditions of seasonal brewing, but one that is as much a marketing initiative as anything. Even then, the most important promise of the new-wine vintage (particularly one that is as record-breaking as 2003) is missing, which is that what's about to reach us will not merely be different from what went before but actually (thanks to nature's beneficence) better.

No brewer will ever claim that a seasonal or temporary offering is actually better than the normal range: that would be to undermine the core business. Yet in the wine world, in thrall to nature's unpredictability, that happens all the time.

The beer world, in sum, needs to take a few more risks if it is to make itself a source of excitement and wonder in the way that wine so evidently is. Retailers should make more of the opportunities for selling that which is different, unusual and singular. But above all, brewers, both giant and tiny, should be more adventurous about ringing the changes in what they brew.

Supplies of malt and hops are always steady for the brewer, unlike the wine grower with his differently-constituted grapes every year. If we are to have an element of divine unpredictability, then, it has to come not from the caprices of nature, but from human ingenuity.