In a survey published in the Journal of Wine Research, Tim Unwin noted that the words people most associate with beer are "pub," "men," "louts," and "belly" (presumably as in "beer" not "six-pack"). Beer is also "positively associated with increased laziness."
By comparison, wine's words were kind and benign: "meals," "women," "sophistication," and "special" characterized wine drinking, as did "feelings of romance and/or sexiness."
Wine and beer, these are different worlds, surely. Separate. And not entirely equal.
How do I know? Would advertising lie?
By age 12, even the most casual sports fan has the beer drinker's bio down pat. TV tells us he is male, youthful, slothful, and slobbish, often proudly unsophisticated, and stridently inept at attracting (and keeping around) females, preferring to hang out with his dumb guy friends drinking beers and fighting over the last slice of cold pizza.
Wine is for snobs. Beer is for slobs.
Of course, this portrayal of beer drinkers as buffoonish losers-in-love is no accident. It is, in fact, a stroke of marketing genius. After all, a quiet, romantic setting would suggest wine, not beer, as the more appropriately paired beverage. As we learn from these helpful beer commercials, a woman would only come between a man and his cold brew. Like a genetic trigger, the sight of a sweating bottle of beer is meant to trump even the sexual impulse, luring the man toward it, saucer-eyed and salivating.
Meanwhile, the booze news from Denmark is no better for beer bingers. A Danish study found beer drinking is "significantly associated with a higher prevalence of risk drinking, smoking, and illicit drug use." Wine drinking, on the other hand, is "significantly associated with higher IQ, higher parental educational level and higher socioeconomic status." The study also found wine drinkers to be less neurotic, less anxious, less depressed, and to suffer from fewer psychotic thoughts and delusions. The authors concluded wine drinking was indicative of "optimal social, cognitive, and personality development."
Of course, wine drinking makes you smarter and more emotionally stable in much the same way tall trees on the Olympic Peninsula cause rain.
Still, there's something to be said for the healthy way we drink wine. For one thing, we tend to sip wine with dinner, rather than, say, standing at a bar distracted by sports on the TV. And that is, at least in part, why wine is more healthy than other alcoholic drinks: food slows the absorption of alcohol into the bloodstream, and the liver and brain get a gradual dose rather than a rock 'em, sock 'em pounding.
Of course, drinking for health is one thing; for happiness, quite another. And for most, the best part of drinking wine has nothing to do with improving health--health benefits are just an incredibly serendipitous side effect. For us, that bit of wine shared at dinner with friends or family represents the best part of the day.
It is at the table when we can enjoy the wine for its own sake, appreciating the way it complements the flavors of food, and vice versa; the way it sparks conversation; and the way that wine tingles the senses, warms the body and "gladdens the heart." Surely these are the most beneficent benefits of all.
What's this?