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What'll You Have?Field Maloney takes readers' questions on the rise of wine and fall of beer.

Posted Thursday, May 31, 2007, at 5:05 PM ET

Field Maloney was online at Washingtonpost.com on Thursday, May 31, to examine the factors that have boosted wine's popularity over beer, the options brewers have for reclaiming the lead, and whatever other questions readers have about alcoholic beverages. An unedited transcript of the chat follows.

Field Maloney: Good morning, everyone. My name is Field Maloney, and I just wrote a piece for Slate on beer and wine in America. I'm here to answer—or try to answer as best I can—your questions.

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Lincoln, Neb.: You say that the American model of "the good life" shifted from a model based on Northern Europe to a model based on Mediterranean life. I think you're right. Do you have any idea why this happened?

Field Maloney: It's hard to pinpoint precisely the factors behind large cultural shifts like that. Partly, it seems like these things happen because of big personalities at the right time: someone like Mario Batali say. David Brooks wrote a great book, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There, that examines these cultural shifts—I think of it as a great loosening up of American culture.

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Gaithersburg, Md.: I am a wine lover who wants to enjoy beer, but I find it a tad too bitter. I currently drink Belgian Iambics when I can find them (Lindemans's Framboise, etc.) ... what else can I try that is along that "sweet" line so I can have more options when I don't find this offered at an establishment? Thanks!

Field Maloney: I'm not a beer authority, but I think a lot of the American craft-brewers are making ales that are fruit-inflected these days, and they usually have a touch of sweetness. (The best ones, like Lindemans's in Belgium, use real fruit. The lesser ones add fruit concentrate or even just fruit flavoring and sugar.)

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Falls Church, Va.: Who at the Post thought it would be a good idea to schedule a discussion of wine and beer at 10 a.m.? Do journalists think that everyone shares their habits of drinking in the morning? Obviously this is subject matter better suited for the late afternoon.

Field Maloney: Very good point. I'll get to it once I finish my morning cocktail.

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D.C. Wine Blogger: I love this topic! Thanks for surfacing it and for your insight, particularly into the passion vs. refinement question. I think there are a couple other reasons for wine's ascendance that you didn't mention in your article: More people are beginning to realize (consciously or not) that wine and food enhance each other, but beer is a refresher that washes food down. A lot of wine—or at least wine in the under-$20 category—has been dressed down and become more democratic ... even more democratic than the Robert Parker descriptors of tobacco, cassis and chokecherries. I think the boom in "critter label" marketing and also in wine blogging by casual enthusiasts—who review wine in haiku poetry and in profanity-laden language—is a testament to this point. I'd be interested to know whether you—or the other chatters—agree with this. Thanks!

Field Maloney: I agree with you completely—the "critter label" phenomenon, most notable with Yellow Tail, had a huge impact in making wine seem more informal and approachable to Americans. I do think beer can be more than just a "refresher" with food—that is, I think its flavors can play off the flavors of food nicely.

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Somerville, Mass.: A lot of your article discusses the effect of marketing and image. I've always understood one truth of marketing to be that if you target a specific group (for this comment, we'll use "the well to do" and "the ne'er do well") you take a risk of offending another, opposed group. If this is true, as wine becomes more popular with the ne'er do wells, it will lose some of its appeal to the well to do? Beer has addressed this problem, kind of, with the advent of craft brews. Has something, or will something, similar happen with wine?

Field Maloney: Good question. I wrote about this subject in a piece I did for Slate on golf and tennis. The trick for marketers is always to expand their audience, without losing the aura of exclusiveness and prestige that has made their product aspirational in the first place. How do you increase your marketing share without watering down the exclusiveness of your brand?

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Oakland, Calif.: One thing your story did not address, but made all the difference for my extended family: the influence the women in the family have on what is offered at family gatherings. Most of the women in my family don't like the taste of beer, nor how it fills them up. When the U.S. started to offer locally made wines that tasted fabulous, my family started to migrate toward serving wine at family functions instead of beer because it is the women who arrange our family gatherings. Once the men had tried wine, they found out they liked it as much as beer. We now serve only wine at family gatherings.

Field Maloney: This is a very interesting point. I think the power women have regarding what goes on the American table probably hasn't been explored enough. (And I wonder how it has changed through the decades and centuries. Is it greater or less now than it was, say, 50 years ago?)

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Philadelphia: Another question: despite the Gallup Poll in 2005 (the 2006 poll put beer back on top, by the way, but it didn't get anywhere near the press attention the 2005 one did—more evidence of a wine-wing media bias...) beer continues to handily outsell wine, both in volume and dollar sales. What's that indicate?

Field Maloney: Good question. Some of the beer people pointed this out in 2005. Even though more Americans said they preferred wine in that pool, beer still outsold wine 6 to 1. So either a very few people drink a whole lot of beer, or people are more stuck on beer than they let on. I think because wine has become more of a "lifestyle" drink, people might be more likely to say they "prefer" wine in a poll, even though they actually drink more beer. But who knows? The unpredictable psychology of polling behavior is fascinating to me.

Also, I think the American media loves stories that indicate a shift in the status quo. In this case, with wine vs. beer, it was a shift in the status quo that seemed to reinforce some larger cultural trends. That kind of stuff is catnip to journalists.