A few years ago, I decided to become a beer drinker, mostly
because there was a certain kind of person who was shocked to
see a woman drinking beer, and I figured it was my civic duty to
continue shocking these people. (By ‘person’, I really mean ‘man’,
but I don’t want to get yelled at on the internet.)
For a while there, I enjoyed taking a swig of the most blue-collar
brew I could find, then waiting for someone – anyone – to ask
whether I was enjoying the icy cold beer I was holding (or whether,
maybe, it was just a prop in my daily performance of Strange
Person Holds Beer in Public Place). “Yes,” I would say, “I love the
yeasty drink.” And then I would wipe my foam moustache away with
a beer coaster because, why not. I’m a beer drinker now.
Because I have done this for so long, and because I have so
deliberately allied myself with the delicious frosty broth as a way
of making a statement against THE MAN, I have also recently
come to realise that I do not understand wine. If I’m going to be
completely honest, I think I might resent wine. It makes me feel
bad about myself.
It’s not so much the wine itself, I suppose – the grape water is good.
And it’s not that I think beer and wine are in some type of fight-to-
the-death competition – they’re equally complex, I get it, with allkinds of splendid variations and improvisations to discover. It’s just
that wine seems to involve weird ceremonies and vocabularies that
I don’t really understand; that seem quite distant from words such
as ‘normal’ and concepts such as ‘I am OK with that’.
Consider this: exhibit A, a memory from my teenage years. The
protagonist: me, a 15-year-old who is both deeply insecure and
extremely over-confident. (Later on today, I will ride my bike into
a bush because I’m being swooped by a magpie, but I don’t know
that yet.) The scene: the home of my friend, Tegan.We’re gathered around a kitchen table, where Tegan’s dad asks
me to open a bottle of red wine with a sommelier knife. I don’t
know how, because I’m 15 and work at McDonald’s, and Tegan’s
dad thinks this is hilarious. He opens the wine and asks me to
decant it. I don’t know what that means, so he chuckles some more.
Tegan pours it into a clear flask and he asks her if it has sediment.
She says “yes”. She then turns to me and says in a very serious,
worshipful voice, “My dad is a wine grandmaster,” as if that is even
a thing. I just googled it, Tegan – it’s not.
To summarise: sommelier knife, decant, flask, sediment,
grandmaster. Someone might have said the word ‘aerate’. And here
I am, 18 years later, still mad. This is what wine does to people.
If someone asks me now what kind of wine I like, I don’t know
what to say. If I say what I’m thinking – “Most wine tastes the same
to me, do you think my tongue has problems?” – then I’ll probably
get reported to the wine police (or whatever the institutionalised
version of Tegan’s dad is). Instead, I usually find myself incoherently
babbling a list of adjectives, fruits and flavours until the wine person
brings me something that tastes more or less like every other wine
I’ve ever gulped, swished or sniffed in my entire sad life.
To be fair, it’s possible that maybe I am just saying the wrong words,
and if I said something like, “Mossy and leathery with top notes of
ghee,” then I would end up with a delicious glass of something crisp
and lovely. But that’s sort of the point, really. Do you know what kind
of beer I like? Cold beer. That’s it.hold the wine
ROWENA GRANT-FROST DOESN’T
MUCH CARE FOR A FINE DROP.
PhotoLukasz Wierzbowskirant