The quest for fine beer

The striking contrast between beer and wine appreciation deserves closer attention, says Andrew Jefford

About a month ago, I found myself in the St Emilion region of Bordeaux, on the very day the wine harvest began. It won't be the vintage of the century (they've already had two, in 2000 and 2005), but that just made my visit more interesting. When a great vintage comes along, all a wine-maker has to do is to try not to mess things up. Wine-making skills, by contrast, come to the fore when nature has withheld its trumps: not enough sun, too much rain, or an attack of botrytis affecting some of the grapes.

A revolution has happened since I last took a close look at the Bordeaux version of this process. Once upon a time, grapes arrived by the trailerload, and were unceremoniously dumped into a giant steel trench with a screw in the bottom. Now they arrive stacked up in baskets barely larger than punnets, and are carefully unloaded onto a little conveyor belt. Every serious cellar is now equipped with a huge array of equipment to jiggle, shake and dunk these grapes; and after all that, they are picked over again by a team of hawk-eyed village matrons. Finally, it's back onto another conveyor belt for the slow, cautious journey into the vats.

Going for perfection

What's the point of all this? It means that any grape that isn't absolutely perfect - whole, unblemished, pristine and with an ideal balance of sugar in relation to its other components - won't make it in. Dustbins full of discards are wheeled out, bound for oblivion.

The end result is better wine. Of course, other techniques play a role, too, but gentle fruit handling and fastidious selection has been the most important of the changes that the last decade has brought to Bordeaux at the top level. That's why Bordeaux remains at the summit of the wine hierarchy.

New price records are broken every time another great vintage Bordeaux comes along, and aspiring consumers around the world are driven into a frenzy of desire to possess the dark, succulent, sumptuous reds.

The top end of the wine world is a place where nothing stands still. Everyone is always trying to make tiny improvements that will result in better concentration, sweeter fruit, and softer, more voluptuous textures.

Quality is always the holy grail - producers know that where quality leads, the market will naturally follow. The very idea of cutting corners on ingredients to sell more cheaply, or allowing marketing considerations to dominate production parameters, would be regarded as an admission of failure and strategic error.

Quality profile

The contrast with beer is striking. Ingredients? What are they? I'd be surprised if even one in 10 of the people loading slabs of tinned lager into their supermarket trolleys at weekends could name the ingredients of the drink on which they spend a sizeable proportion of their income. And the source of those ingredients could be... anywhere.

Brewing techniques? Not a clue. We know nothing at all about leading beers, apart from their names and packaging uniforms, their latest TV adverts and sponsorship strategies. In a wine sense, their quality profile is zero.

You might interject that large wine brands aren't hugely dissimilar to large beer brands in this respect. Indeed, they aren't - but at least they try to convey a sense of quality and authenticity with the fairy-tale wine-growing scenes which are common in their advertising. And all wine is able to profit from the locomotive effect of fine or great wine: the existence of fabulous bottles enables more ordinary bottles to bask in a little of their allure. Whereas, for most beer drinkers, great beer doesn't exist.

Brighter future for beer

Even the British real ales, Czech and German lagers, Belgian beers and American micro-brewed beers that represent quality for genuine enthusiasts still don't begin to touch the summits of price, exclusivity and interest enjoyed by the greatest wines. This is partly because the print of each new season is very faint in modern brewing: consistency is regarded as a universal brewing ideal, and no-one ever says that the '07 beers aren't as good as the '05s, but are much better than the '04s.

Partly, too, it is because once a successful recipe for a beer has been achieved, that is generally the way it stays; the quest for perfection is abandoned, rather than (as in the wine world) continually tinkered with, improved and refined.

And partly, too, it is because beer packaging is still dismally poor. I know of no beer that looks a million dollars. Plenty of wines do.

Need it be like this? I don't think so. We haven't arrived at the end of brewing history yet; far from it. There are still many quality peaks to climb, many new strategies to try, and many innovative ways of creating beers that are finer, more complex, more rewarding and more interesting than those that went before.

There is still room to create bottles (or even cans) of beer which, placed in the middle of a dining table, would set hearts fluttering in the way a classy bottle of wine can do.

There are still exquisite aromas and flavours to be conjured from malt, yeast and hops that we haven't even dreamed of yet. There is, in sum, a whole category of beer - let's call it fine beer - which doesn't even yet exist.

One day, fortunes will be made with fine beer. Why not one day soon?