Here’s an interesting conceit that occurred to me the other day while I was writing about tasting and opinion:

In craft brewing, the brewmaster brings a lifetime of personal experience and taste bias to designing a beer. While there’s a certain amount of cloning of the recipes from other breweries and adapting to prevalent styles each brewmaster, given the limitations of their personal experience, creates certain recipes; Can ONLY create certain recipes based on their experiential palate. This is done with the ingredients that are available to them. It accounts for a lot. People come up with things that no one else has thought to create or, indeed, would be able to create. A Black Oak Pale Ale will be different from a Publican Square Nail Pale Ale will be different from a product in a similar style from any other brewery. Maybe not substantially different, but certainly quantifiably different.

In order to do this, there are a lot of ingredient choices available, and my understanding is that the majority of the ingredients are available year round. To create his Dunkel, Michael Hancock is using a dehusked black malt from Bamberg in Germany. Mike Lackey from Great Lakes recently created a cask ale called Armadildo IPA. I have to assume that it uses Amarillo hops. I am fairly sure that those aren’t grown in Ontario. In order to create a successful signature beer, they have to be able to make these things year round. The ingredients have to be available all the time and the fact that the choice has been made to use them lends an element of authenticity and sophistication to the process.

The thought that occurs is that with the constant availability of ingredients, there’s an exploitation of globalization happening. Dogfish Head has a beer called Pangaea , which uses one ingredient from each continent. This is an extreme example. Many brewers seem to be content to brew less obviously esoteric beverages, but the ability to pick and choose ingredients from all over the world allows a certain amount of expression. It almost certainly explains the growing popularity of craft beer that the level of choice and expression the form allows a brewer relates directly to the amount of choice a consumer has at the LCBO or Beer Store. It’s an international process from ingredient sourcing to hoisting a pint glass.

This got me thinking about wine; and Ian Fleming.

In just about any James Bond movie you can think of, Bond will display his knowledge of wine or sherry or port or some grape based beverage. He’ll say something like “Ah yes, the LaFite ’63. An excellent vintage.” Substitute “yesh” and “eckshellent” if you’re a Connery purist.

If you know more about wine than I do, and that will be just about everyone reading this, then you’re probably going to scoff at the following:

Wine vintages seem to consist of a number of things but mostly “Terroir” meaning the soil, weather conditions and farming techniques that help to produce the grapes for that vineyard. There’s also the variety of grape that’s being grown in the vineyard. The growing season is a certain length, and I’m fairly sure that the grapes don’t really stand up to being transported a great distance. They’ll spoil if they’re not harvested at a certain time and they’ve got to be used within a certain timeframe. It’s an agricultural product, but wine seems to be at the mercy of a relatively large number of variables.

And you’ve got to have land. You have to own a large amount of land on which you can grow the grapes. And since the vines produce different qualities at different ages, you have to own that land for a long time. It’s practically a feudal or seigneurial system of ownership that predicates the quality of the wine being produced. I would think that vintners might be able to develop the character of a wine through years of work on the vineyard, but it’s a hugely lengthy process which is, from year to year, based on environmental factors. A hot, dry growing season would produce a different product than a cold, wet one. It would still be bottled under the same label though, which accounts for the ability of Roger Moore to correct someone about the vintage while looking smug in a way that only he can pull off.

If you wanted to learn properly about wine, you’d have to know about all of these factors. You might have to learn about vintages and why the ’05 Chateau du Frenchname is an outstanding example of that vineyard’s production. You’d also be dependent on the weather conditions from nearly six years ago on the other side of the world. If you drink wines from Ontario, some of which are of quite high quality these days, the same problems would exist even though you might have the benefit of local media coverage to ease the learning process.

Beer, if crafted well, is going to be almost identical from batch to batch and year to year. And they usually list the ingredients on the bottle.

The ability of a brewer to create a unique range of constantly available, dependable products by design likely singlehandedly accounts for the popularity of craft brewing. Each brewery develops a following based on the ability of a brewer to choose ingredients to express a vision and the reception of those choices by the consumer. While the ingredients may be grown somewhere in Europe or the US, it’s still produced locally and a loyal local and even national following becomes possible. It’s one of the reasons that I could probably pick Sam Calagione and Garrett Oliver out of a lineup, while I can’t name a single vintner.

In an era where the celebrity chef is a cultural phenomenon and the reputations of people like Marco Pierre White or Ferran Adria (locally Jamie Kennedy or Susur Lee, I guess) are enough to make people travel huge distances to eat a meal, it makes sense that people would want to drink a beverage that was designed by somebody. Beer enthusiasts are already willing to travel to visit their favourite breweries or to visit a brewpub that they hear good things about.  I suspect that it’s only a matter of time until there’s a spate of celebrity brewers in Ontario. I think Mike Duggan may already be trying to do that with his brewpub, given the fact that his name is now visible from several blocks up Victoria street.

What it suggests to me is that timidity isn’t called for. With the increasing market share of craft beer and the inevitable media coverage it will create, it’s probably time to push the envelope with styles that haven’t existed in the province before and expand product ranges beyond the norm and to try and get shelf space in the LCBO. Maintaining flagship brands while doing so is a challenge that Ontario breweries are already trying to face, some with more luck than others. It’s a tall order, but people like choice and a sense of familiarity with the producer of the product helps them to make their choices. How else do you explain the fact that Dave Nichol was able to sell a beer produced by Loblaw’s?

I’m probably wrong about all of that, but I’d love to hear why.