Prost!

I don't know why it's taken me so long, but finally finally I have come to my senses. There is no future for me in wine. I'm going over to beer. Yes, I'm going to learn to appreciate beer.

For the longest time, I was trying to taste the differences in wine, unsuccessfully. Sure you can tell the difference between the $10 bottle and the $40 bottle. But the differences are so minute -- is it really a $30 difference?

You may call me a boor, but I can't appreciate wine. And if truth be told, it seems that no one really knows what a good wine is. And for all that jazz about flavor and batch of crops, you really can just improve the quality of your wine by adding sugar or what not to it. As far as wine is concerned, I think it's an artificial distinction between bottles. Leave me out of it.

Now beer, oh beer. There is a real difference. There is the Belgium White, and the dark stout and you have to be pretty taste-challenged to not be able to tell the difference. It can be smooth, or metallic, or sour. And you can say what you taste and everyone will know what you're talking about. A well-rounded flavor? Whatever.

There is no such thing as the bumper crop of 2001. Beer is good fresh, not sitting around in a bottle for years. There is quality control -- you get as good a beer as you paid for all year round, all decade long.

It's taken me the longest time to come around though, no thanks to my childhood experiences. The only people who drank beer were the men in the family. They were older, and mostly out of shape. Their wives may steal a sip from their mugs, but I never met a woman who enjoyed a good beer. But the smell, oh the smell! I've always liked the way beer smells. Yet it was sour, and bubbly, and grating to the tongue. An acquired taste. Well, maybe the lack of exposure -- they drank about 3 different brands of beer when I was growing up and none of them were that great. And maybe it just wasn't a female thing.

In college, beer was something the frat boys do. Drunken and loud. Just for the sake of getting drunk. No one really cared about the taste. It was cheap and plentiful. That was enough.

Thankfully I recently met people who are serious about their beers. They tend to be rather traditional in their tastes -- blueberry flavored beer? No thanks. Yes, they are Germans. They've been brewing beers for hundreds of years, and they know how to enjoy a good cold beer.

I don't know about you but I used to think of beer in terms of percentage alcohol. Today I change my mind: that's so very wrong. Whatever the alcohol content, I now think of it as a warning label. The point is the taste -- do you like the way it tastes?

My beer tonight supposedly comes with tinges of orange peel and coriander. Whatever. I'll call it Belgium White.

PS. When you toast your friends, be sure to look them in the eye. That's how they do it in Deutchland.