Fermentation. Fermentation is a marvelous process that creates all sorts of complicated molecules. It’s why it’s so prized even when it doesn’t create meaningful alcohol: bread, cheese, soy sauce, cured meats, chocolate, and other delicious foods rely on fermentation for significant parts of their flavor profiles. Fermentation is why it’s dumb to call bourbon “watery syrup” or whatever: it’s so much more complicated than syrup, due to fermentation.
It’s true that there’s not the same sort of connoisseur culture around, say, bread that there is around wine: I’ve never heard of a $10,000 loaf of bread. But there’s a good reason for that: wine is preserved and long-lasting, and can be bought and sold and inherited in a way that bread cannot. The same thing goes for spirits, and in reverse it explains why there aren’t many $1000 bottles of beer out there: beer isn’t nearly as long-lasting as wine or whisky.
The claims about how alcohol connoisseurship is all about delivering a drug display a deep ignorance of the human obsession with all things fermented.
Sure, but all that other stuff has significant qualities aside from the byproducts of the fermentation. Cheese is more storable than milk without refrigeration, but remains a highly nutritious food. Bread is tastier and more nutritious than raw grains. Cured meat stores better than uncured, and so on. All of your examples are food products which either become more storable, more nutritious, or tastier.
Except alcohol, which isn’t really a food. It has calories, but is basically worse as a food than any of its ingredients. Unlike all the other stuff.
Granted, for some alcohols, it’s hard to prevent the fermentation from happening. Store a bunch of grape juice in a warm place and it’ll probably turn into wine whether you want it to or not. But this can be reduced with better practices–unless, of course, you don’t want it to. Because of the alcohol.
Is it possible that the additional flavors from the fermentation process would have nevertheless embedded wine in the culture independent of the alcohol? I won’t say it’s impossible, but it seems doubtful.
Well, sure. All of these fermented products I mentioned have something else going on, whether it’s nutrition or a buzz. But it’d be foolish to describe the hundreds of different cheese varieties as “just a polite way of pretending it’s more than calories”, or to say that expertise in making cured meats is “mere window-dressing to legitimize the fat-seeking experience,” or any of the other absurd suggestions about alcohol in this thread. Curing meats preserves them–but people don’t stop with the basics. They continue exploring how to make better and more complex flavors in their cured meats, just like people explored how to make better and more complex flavors in their wines.
There are non-alcoholic fermented products that have no nutritional value, though. Tabasco is one example. There’s no reason to eat it except for pleasure; the fermentation creates a complexity of flavor that people like.
I’m not denying that people enjoy the buzz from alcohol, but I’m absolutely denying that the enjoyment of it is “just a polite way of pretending that it’s more than a drug,” that it’s “mere window-dressing to legitimize the drug-seeking experience,” that wine culture is “full of shit.” I deny that alcohol is the reason why most people " learned to love the taste of rotten grain", or that that’s a remotely accurate description of brewing.
Sure, and soy sauce, fish sauce, and many others. But I’d argue they are just piggybacking on general food culture. No one is a connoisseur of Tabasco sauce as a standalone beverage (I hope).
I’m not arguing that people only drink for the buzz or anything like that. I’m saying that for alcohol to develop a connoisseur culture, it first had to be a part of the wider general culture. And for that to happen, there had to be some strong underlying force like nutritional value… or intoxication. The flavor complexity couldn’t have been the reason because that didn’t exist initially. It took centuries of development to get there.
Probably alcohol would have been developed anyway, in relation to food. It would just occupy a spot in the culture similar to, say, vinegar–which probably does have its own little connoisseur culture, just not one that’s anywhere close to what wine or other drinks have.
The complexity of a system is no assurance that it has no sine qua non, no single point of failure. These are simply unrelated concepts.
Imaging this: the year is 1963, and Automobili Lamborghini has just announced its first model. It’s generated high expectations among buyers of other prestige cars. There’s even a waiting list bidding up prices based on buzz alone. On the debut day, the crowd is gathered at the demonstration track to see it in action.
From one end of the field, the Lamborghini emerges onto the track. We hear a noise something like an small, angry bee, rising and falling as the vehicle shifts through its gears to reach its top speed. It’s explained that visual appeal and comfort were prioritized early in the design process, and absorbed so much investment that the remaining resources would only support a 60 horsepower engine.
Who will pay tens of thousands of 1963 dollars for a “sports car” that will never go faster than a Vespa? Due to its rarity, it may well be sold at auction for large sums. Probably Feruccio Lamborghini’s mom would buy one (at a family discount). But it won’t be sought-after by connoisseurs of high-performance sports cars. The demand will come from folks who collect Edsels and Tuckers, for those same reasons.
If you want to try more analogies I’m game, but I wish folks would engage with the point I’m making rather than a more refutable substitute.
The sine qua non of every drug experience is obviously the drug. For whatever reasons, people have developed all sorts of other ways to appreciate the product, but without the drug, the demand is diminished if not absent.
Obviously food and cars aren’t drugs, and don’t speak to OP point. But if we did feel like going into rabbit-hole analogies, it will also be shown that there’s no market (apart as a curiosity) for inedible foods, race cars that don’t race, fiddles that don’t fiddle, etc. Sine qua non.
This is a perfect analogy. I wish it had been mentioned sooner.
Vinegar is the first alcohol-free wine. It was well-known to the ancients. LIke wine, it’s made from grapes, it has a complex flavor profile, it pairs with food. I’m told that some old Italian men drink it neat like an aperitif. Some varieties and makers of vinegars are prized and sought-after more than others. It’s not wine, but it has many of the qualities people say they value in wine.
We could argue this is almost a connoisseur culture. I would argue against. There is an EU standard to what’s “balsamic” or not, but there’s no professional grading body. You can buy $1,000 bottles of vinegar. They do exist, but you don’t buy them at competitive auction, you swipe your Visa at Amazon. If you pay more than that for vinegar, almost certainly you were bidding on a rare wine, unaware that it had turned.
It’s pretty clear that wine follows a very different cultural historical trajectory without alcohol in it. And we must also as the question, to what extent does vinegar owe its relevance to the broader relevance of its boozier parent beverage? Without wine, do we care about vinegar?
Disagree. Optimator lasts a lot longer than bread does and actually served as “liquid bread” for monks during fasts. In fact, I’d offer religious orders as a direct refutation of the OP’s thrust on “drug use.”
I’m not sure that people in history really drew that distinction, and today’s alcoholic beverage connoisseur culture derives straight from that early history, through centuries of wine/beer being consumed as an everyday beverage. As in, people drank “small beer” (~3.5% abv) for breakfast, and other beers/wines at other times.
Plus, alcohol does have caloric content. A glass of wine has 85 calories/100 g, while grape juice has 60 calories / 100g. So it’s absolutely useful as a method of storing seasonal produce like fruit or grains in a format that keeps longer, and is easily consumed.
It’s a lot of beneficial things all in one package, and yes getting a buzz is one of those things. Anyway, all those things are why alcoholic beverages ended up interwoven in human societies the world over, and now, centuries later, we’ve got a connoisseurship culture around them. But at no point has it just been about the buzz alone.
Screw capsules are better than natural corks in every way except one; theater. Cork adds nothing to the flavor of the wine, and adds several vectors for spoilage. But we digress.
Sure, but you’re still missing the point. The argument is not, AFAICT, that alcohol’s drug effects weren’t crucial at some point to the historical development of its particular connoisseurship culture. The argument is that drug effects are not a priori necessary for the development of connoisseurship culture.
Whose argument? That’s not something I would contest, nor is it in the scope of the OP, which is explicitly limited to the scope of drugs. But if you need to hear me say it, fine. Conoisseurship exists for things that aren’t drugs. Let’s move past that.
And likewise I’d love to hear someone admit that although there are obviously connoisseurs of steak, which obviously isn’t a drug, the truth or falsehood of that fact is irrelevant to the question of alcohol’s role in beverage connoisseurship. There are overlapping factors, of course - scarcity, prestige, etc, but none of it speaks to the obvious and distinct difference of the drug content.
That they went back to eating bread after the fast seems to indicate that the beer wasn’t a great substitute, just better than nothing.
In any case, weird religious beliefs don’t seem like quite enough to drive widespread adoption. The general public wasn’t drinking beer as a fasting cheat.
Wikipedia at least suggests that small beer/table beer in the Middle Ages was more like 1% ABV. A worker might drink 10 pints of it a day–but that only amounts to ~400 kcal.
On the other hand, it had a high amount of suspended particulates, to the point of being “porridge-like” at times. I’d suggest most of the calories came from that; not so much the alcohol.
Also (again, if various sites are to be believed), table beers then were produced from the absolute dregs of the process–maybe the third runnings of the mash, which they didn’t bother to filter out after. Which suggests that it was only economic because the high-alcohol, high-value content had already been extracted.
At any rate, my point isn’t that there aren’t no other relevant factors. Just that these, added up, wouldn’t have led to the almost universal sustained use. Especially as many of the previous reasons are now obsolete, with easy food preservation and cheap calories in different forms.
I dispute the claim that people who say they enjoy a 16 year old Scotch over moonshine are just looking to legitimize drug seeking or pretending it’s more than just a drug.
The problem isn’t that people won’t admit that alcohol has a role in beverage connoisseur culture. It’s that your first post in the thread was absurdly over-the-top, and you’ve yet to step away from the claims that are so problematic.
If this is actually a subject you’d like to become more informed about, I recommend you pick up a copy of A History of the World in Six Glasses. Beer as a beverage is really closely related to bread as a food, and early beer was nutritionally similar to early bread. Wine has been produced for almost as long as agriculture has occurred, dating back eight or nine thousand years. When did “connoisseur culture” arise around wine, and why did it not arise around beer until so much later?
These are interesting questions, but your dismissive posts about “drug delivery systems” completely gloss over what makes them interesting.
Well… it’s really about sugars at that point, as the yeast hasn’t got hold of it yet. But yeah, it was probably totally dependent on how well the previous mashings had been sparged.
Either way, beer/wine was more of a food, and less of a vehicle to get wasted in those days.
Yeah, a buddy from somewhat rural West Virginia (isn’t it all sort of rural?) was describing actual moonshine today at lunch when the conversation had turned to whiskey, and the description was (paraphrased) “I thought they’d given me some gasoline as a joke”.
If you’re drinking that, it’s strictly to get drunk. But a 16 year old Scotch is something different. One that’ll give you a buzz, but not one you just pound shots of like a frat kid trying to get drunk.
The reason I don’t step away from them is because, as you correctly noted, people prefer to engage the tone instead of the substance on this topic, as you’re doing here. Or alternately, drive by with whatabouts, unreasoned analogies, and personalized barbs that I’ve taken some care (probably too much care) to dissect.
What a bizarre reason to quadruple down on that nonsense–but you do you, I guess. I feel pretty confident that your contrafactual beliefs on this topic have been adequately addressed.
I agree. The whole notion that it’s some sort of smokescreen or camouflage to legitimize drug-seeking behavior is just absurd. Many of us have pointed out that economically, most alcohol-related connoisseurship is just too damn expensive to be mere drug-seeking behavior. Same thing with cigar connoisseurship.
I have this sort of mental itch that’s telling me that shelf life has something to do with it, and why it doesn’t happen for most other foods. For example, beer was historically something that was generally made locally and consumed locally, because it had a relatively short shelf life. Contrast this with wine, which was something with a much longer shelf life, and was already shipped long distances in Roman times. I feel like that could be a big part of the puzzle- things like beer were in essence, foods that were brewed and consumed locally. Wine and later spirits on the other hand, were products that could be produced and sold over a wider area, and that people could compare to previous years and/or ones from other production areas. That sort of thing only became true for beer in the late 19th/early 20th centuries, and really only in earnest in the last 3-4 decades in the US.
That long shelf life and yes, ability to give someone a buzz sets wine and spirits up to specifically be luxury goods and status symbols, and when combined with the other stuff, it seems like a connoisseurship culture wasn’t an unlikely outcome.