On pubs and drunks

Where I grew up the beer was warm and the landlord cold. The beer was also flat and very bitter, in itself a control on binge drinking until I discovered lager.

Journalists can’t resist boozy stories and the New York Times crawls around Oxford’s pubs (Cambridge’s are just as sordid) while Book Forum stumbles through Kingsley Amis’s “daily haze of whisky and sweat alcohol”.

“A good pub is a ready-made party, a home away from home, a club anyone can join,” says the NYT. “A pub is a great leveler — not a workingman’s club, but an everyman’s club. The best are filled not only with the scent of yeast and hops, but also with banter and wit. Back in 1954, when the Rose & Crown on North Parade Avenue in Oxford was threatened with closure (inadequate toilet facilities), the defense that won the day called it a “home of cultured, witty and flippant conversation.”

There is no doubt Amis would certainly be cultured and his bon mots compelling but apparently he had no taste when it came to booze:

“Having thus elevated the role of drink to the highest status in human civilization, Amis proceeds with a series of disconnected essays on different types of alcohol, some dreadful-sounding cocktail recipes (see above), a good piece on the types of glasses and tools for making and drinking different beverages, some not very sage reflections on wine, and some even worse ideas about what should and should not be drunk with what food. All enjoyable to read, of course, but what is best in this book are the author’s perorations not on the taste of alcohol, but on its effects. No one who has read his novels could deny that he is the grand master when it comes to describing different levels of inebriation—feeling sober, that first drink, the sensations of getting drunk, blind drunkenness, and, of course, the hangover.”

Meanwhile, The Telegraph in the UK is running a series on great British pubs.

Is wine blogging good for wine?

WIne blogging takes a backseat to food. But still it attracts the usual debate and criticism. A Wine and Spirit investigation tackles the subject:

“… is blogging good for wine? The blogosphere seems to be at a crossroads, with an investigation by W&S revealing it is coming under increasing commercial pressures that threaten its very raison d’être as an informal, immediate and independent way of chatting about wine.

As well as major retailers and suppliers trying to get in on the act with their own blogs, the bloggers are being offered cash in return for favourable product reviews on their sites. And a US supplier that regularly posts favourable reviews of its own products on bloggers’ sites is just the tip of the iceberg. It’s becoming increasingly hard to distinguish which content is independent and which is commercially motivated.”

Via Spittoon

Glass half empty as pub chains fail after smoking bans

More than a few people are surprised at the silly millions pubs are selling for. But could it be that they are overpriced now with interest rates peaking at over 9 per cent? Already the smoking ban is taking it’s toll – recently The Gin Palace’s Vernon Chalker said his takings dropped over 20 per cent after the ban. Luckily he had the foresight to open Madame Brussels with its vast outside terrace for smoking.

Now Crikey! reports on major banks about to take a $1 billion hit from flaky pub lending. That’s in the same week that The Independent in London reported on the Laurel Pub Company, the one behind the Slug and Lettuce and other well known brands went into administration. That’s a chain of 388 pubs on the brink all affected by the UK’s smoking ban. As the Independent says:

“According to the British Beer and Pubs Association, the smoking ban in England and Wales combined with the credit crunch and a decline in drinking are responsible for closing pubs at their fastest rate in history – 27 a week.
The Massive Pub Company, which owned the Tup chain of pubs in London and the Sports Café chain, have both been placed in administration, while Regents Inns, owner of the Walkabout chain, has been forced into the sale of 94 bars.
In the past two months, Marstons, Greene King, Fuller, Smith and Turner and Wetherspoons have all announced their profits have been hit by the ban on smoking in public.”

I’ve noticed more than a few well known and loved local institutions feeling a bit more than empty at peak times. Crikey! says that National Leisure and Gaming Ltd and Hedley Leisure and Gaming Property Fund are wobbly thanks to smoking bans, increased food and staff costs, high interest rates and a falling numbers of pokies:

“The crazy days of greedy publicans living high on the hog and borrowing to the hilt to enjoy their exotic lifestyles are well and truly over.”

The green beer that isn’t and the goat that is

Mountain Goat has established an enviable reputation for being green. Staff are incentivised to cycle to work. There are solar panels on the roof. Oh, and the beer is pretty good too.

It must be irksome when brewing giant Fosters comes along with Cascade Green, as reported in The Age by beer writer Willie Simpson:

“[Cascade Green] claims to be preservative-free and to use glass that is “the lightest weight, highest recycled content currently available in Australia”. Both are probably true but they neglect important qualifications – namely, that the beer is still presumably made with stabilisers and other additives, commonly used by mainstream breweries, and is both heat-pasteurised and filtered. Both these processes use a lot of energy and Cascade Green is then packaged in a slim 330-millilitre bottle that requires proportionately more energy to fill than something larger.”

Expensive wine tastes better cheap wine – official

Expensive wine does taste better than cheap and don’t let anybody tell you otherwise. From Underexposed.
The only trouble with wine is the smoke and mirrors in the marketing. Is an expensive wine really that much better than a cheap wine? Surely the differences in the yields of grapes and production can’t make that much difference.
It seems the fact that we sometimes enjoy more what the marketers tell us to enjoy could be true as demonstrated by a study from Antonio Rangel, an associate professor of economics at Caltech.

“Rangel and his colleagues had 20 volunteers taste five wine samples which, they were told, were identified by their different retail prices: $5, $10, $35, $45, and $90 per bottle. While the subjects tasted and evaluated the wines, their brains were scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI.

The subjects consistently reported that they liked the taste of the $90 bottle better than the $5 one, and the $45 bottle better than the $35 one. Scans of their brains supported their subjective reports; a region of the brain called the medial orbitofrontal cortex, or mOFC, showed higher activity when the subjects drank the wines they said were more pleasurable.

There was a catch to the experiment, however. Although the subjects had been told that they would taste five different, variously priced wines, they actually had sampled only three. Wines 1 and 2 were used twice, but labeled with two different prices. For example, wine 2 was presented as the $90 wine (its actual retail price) and also as the $10 wine. When the subjects were told the wine cost $90 a bottle, they loved it; at $10 a bottle, not so much. In a follow-up experiment, the subjects again tasted all five wine samples, but without any price information; this time, they rated the cheapest wine as their most preferred.”

As the Boston Globe reported the experiment was conducted inside a scanner:

“…the drinks were sipped via a network of plastic tubes – that allowed the scientists to see how the subjects’ brains responded to each wine. When subjects were told they were getting a more expensive wine, they observed more activity in a part of the brain known to be involved in our experience of pleasure.”

Via 1001 Dinners, 1001 Nights

One river three regions, pick Chinon now

The Loire is three regions for wine – Muscadet, Savennières and Chinon. Each expresses its own character from its distinctive terroir.
In Chinon the reds are made mostly from cabernet franc although since the turn of the century up to 25 per cent of a blend can be Cabernet Sauvignon.
According to Eric

Assimov in the New York Times:

“In a good year, the wines offer savory berry flavors, with herbal, earth and mineral tones that add a welcome complexity. Good acidity makes them lively and refreshing, and they can age and improve for 10 to 20 years.
In a great year, these wines are absolutely delicious, with spicy raspberry and cherry flavors. They show intensity and elegance while remaining fresh and vivacious.
And make no mistake: 2005 was a great year, as the wine panel confirmed in a recent tasting of 25 bottles of 2005 Chinon.”