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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.

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Richmond, Va.: Can the rise of wine popularity be partly attributed to the range of prices and better offerings for lower prices? It's no longer taboo (for most people) to set a bottle of $7.99 Yellow Tail Shiraz on the table. Heck, some restaurants even serve Woodbridge and Sutter Home wines, which retail for less than $5 per bottle at most stores.

Field Maloney: Definitely. A huge factor in all this, which I didn't really go into in my piece, is that wine-making overall has improved vastly in the past two or three decades. The quality of cheap wine has gone up astoundingly. I think that made it easier for Americans to think of it as an everyday drink and not a special occasion luxury. (And I think that was the big hurdle for the American wine industry—how to get Americans to think of wine as an everyday thing, the way they do, say, in France or Italy.)

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Alexandria, Va.: When it comes down to it, wine just seems to give me a better buzz than beer. Don't get me wrong, I like beer just as much as the average American woman, but I love wine because it seems there is a whole art that goes into selecting just the right bottle for the occasion (or non-occasion, like a Tuesday night).

Field Maloney: This is an interesting point, when you say "wine just seems to give me a better buzz than beer." Many people believe that different kind of alcohols cause different kind of intoxications—that gin, say, gives you one kind of high, that is different from wine's, which is different from beer's, and so on. I'd be very interested to know if there is any scientific basis for this. I've certainly found many people swear by it.

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Cleveland: Are you kidding with this article? Macro beer sales are flat; craft and import beers are fastest growing alcohol segment. Craft beer is somewhere around 18 percent growth this year, and just a little bit less than that last year. This is why Anheuser-Busch is trying to get a piece of the craft beer market. The craft beer movement is huge and still gaining momentum. Your article completely ignores this.

Field Maloney: You're right that the craft beer segment has shown robust growth in the past few years. I think it's an encouraging sign for beer in America, and there certainly has been a renaissance of great beers being made here. But craft beer still only commands about 5 percent of the American beer market, so it's still a drop in the pint glass. (Bad pun, sorry.)

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Arlington, Va.: In one corner, there are wines for the masses—two-buck chuck, Box wines and screw-top wines that get great reviews for their quality and accessibility; then in the other corner there are the expensive wines for $60-$80, and that crowd that would turn up their nose at the rest.

I think that the most well-known wines are the expensive Chateaux Margaux with a fine reputation, and the mass-produced and well-advertised wines. The true "value" wines—excellent quality, the for which reputation has not pumped up the price—are the hardest to identify. Do you have a recommendation?

Field Maloney: Well, there's a whole industry out there—on the Web, in books, and magazines—dedicated to searching out value wines. Often unfashionable or overlooked regions or varieties are the key for values: Portugal is making great wine these days, I love the white wines of Alsace, and there are some great whites being made in New York's Finger Lakes.

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Helena, Mont.: Don't you think that part of the reason for falling beer sales may be that more people are brewing their own?

Field Maloney: I don't think so, because the home-brew movement (which I'm a big fan of—in fact, as a kid I used to brew my own root beer) still is a tiny sliver of the American beer trade. I think the opposite is true, in fact—the more people make their own beer, the more they will be interested in seeking out and tasting good American beers to buy. I think the DIY ethic in food and drink, which is growing, is a great thing for this country.

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Roseland, N.J.: I was chosen to attend a advertising focus group for an import beer I shall leave unnamed. I won't get into the details (man was it bad) except the core concept revolved around the consumer being faced with difficult relationship problems that demanded they make a choice. This begs the question: Is one issue that men associate beer with misery and woe? If my girlfriend's spending time with her old flame, I don't tell the bartender "gimme the fruitiest Riesling you got—and leave the bottle."

Field Maloney: Very well put. Don't cry in your Riesling, as they say. Drinking is as much about association as it is about taste. The trick of marketing is finding the right associations and making them stick (and banishing the wrong ones). It's sort of Spuds MacKenzie meets Proust's madeleine.

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Field Maloney: Thank you everyone for all your questions. I've had fun trying to answer them.