Wine, beer, spirits? Take your pick
For the first time ever, wine, beer and spirits are equal in the eyes of the public, at least here in San Francisco and, I think, throughout coastal California. This is where cultural trends begin, so there’s no reason not to think this equality will not shortly apply throughout the country.
I make this claim because, as I keep my finger on the cultural pulse, it’s obvious to me that no one of this trio of alcoholic beverages can any longer claim cultural or culinary supremacy. For many years, wine was in the driver’s seat, due, no doubt, to San Francisco’s location as gateway to wine country. The fashionable people—those in the know, the ones who set the trends—preferred wine. Beer was for frat boys, while spirits were for boozy traveling salesmen at hotel bars imbibing Mad Men-style martinis.
How that has changed! Suddenly, beer became craft, not Bud Lite, and the most interesting people—the tattoo crowd of artisans, musicians, code writers, jocks—started adoring it. All you read about anymore were craft breweries, which were uber-cool. Stores such as Whole Foods and even Safeway vied to find the latest little microbrewery. Prices for individual bottles skyrocketed to $10, $15, $20. Beer labeling turned into High Art, the 21st century equivalent of the psychedelic rock and roll posters of the 1960s. Beer gardens opened featuring food as interesting as in any wine bar. Even women—traditionally not beer drinkers—turned to this newly fashionable drink.
And then spirits graduated from the preferred drink of the cigarette and “quicker liquor” crowd to the province of the mixologists, the coolest crowd there ever was. Bartenders became as famous as NFL quarterbacks or guitar-thumping thrash rockers. Magazines like The Tasting Panel featured hot, handsome, sexy mixologists in tatts and Panama hats: it was no longer unusual for an aspiring, up-and-coming kid to want to pour in a club. The top restaurants expanded their wine lists to include beer and every kind of spirit there is. In San Francisco, the Valencia Corridor sprouted almost overnight from being a dull stretch of used clothing stores and cheap apartments to the hottest, trendiest neighborhood in San Francisco, largely due to the bars and restaurants where new cocktails were invented overnight, using the weirdest new ingredients.
And so the stage was set, in the Recessionary years, for us to re-emerge from that awful darkness into a new time where you can no longer define which cultural club someone belongs to based on what they drink. Everybody drinks everything. It’s simply a matter of how they feel at the moment. The die-hard Cabernet drinker discovered trendy infused-vodka cocktails, or rediscovered the retro gimlet. The burly Giants fan discovered that Chablis—the real stuff—isn’t just for girls. The ladies turned to Sierra Nevada or Lagunitas to drink with their charcuterie. And we’re all the happier for it.
This is good news, of course, but it also means that all producers are going to have to compete that much harder. The drinking population of this country always will have its limits due to a variety of factors that inhibit some people from imbibing. So it seems to me that creativity is going to be the je ne sais quoi that sells products. This, of course, reverts to marketing, that mysteriously opaque religion which everyone professes to understand, but doesn’t.
For me, once Napa Cabernets routinely hit the triple-digit price tag, it was easy to look for other libations. Fortunately, there are more interesting spirit and beer offerings than ever!
Good blog, Steve. I’m sharing it around.
Don