Of course not everything is as rosy as the cheeks of those discerning drinkers (who are however shipping nearly a third less of the stuff than they did 40 years ago) – brewers do get bought up (Stella Artois, long ago, by what is now AB Inbev; Affligem by Heineken) and there is more bog-standard stuff than before (although even “white van” Stella – in the embossed tinnies found in metropolitan offies – which is brewed there, is hugely superior to the UK-brewed version) and, in among the couple of dozen unique Belgian styles, there are some that only a local could like. Taken overall, though, the good stuff is arguably the best in the world.

Some of the styles …

abbey beers – similar to the Trappist beers but made by (avowedly) commercial companies … don’t get me started but AB Inbev’s Leffe Blonde does seem to taste saccharine-y, doesn’t it (although the Brune doesn’t)?

ales – sometimes made in the style of British versions, which is encouraging (De Koninck, Palm)

bière brut – fine things intended to be made in the image of, and with similarly labour-intensive methods and prices as, Champagne … we’ll see (Bosteels)

lambics – are “wild beers,” and they taste of the woods: wine-like, tart – sour even – and smoky and spicy. They are a true artisan product, using a third raw wheat in the grist, just a few hops as a preservative and then fermented over an extended period – sometimes years – by airborne yeasts which are encouraged to thrive in a hygeine regime that would give most head-brewers the screaming ab-dabs. An acquired taste, the best route in is via geuze (aka gueuze) the semi-commercial form, which mixes young and old beers (Belle-Vue, Cantillon, De Ranke, Girardin, Timmermans); fruit beers like kriek (with cherries – Liefmans) and framboise (with raspberries – Chapeau) are made with lambics and are fine as long as you think of them as being something somewhat other than beer

red and brown beers – tart enough to shock the uninitiated, the former with a vinegar twang, these are a Flemish speciality (Rodenbach)

saison – strong, sharp, copper-coloured ales brewed for summer (Dupont, Fantôme) and catching on with UK craft-brewers

Trappist beer – unlike monastery-breweries elsewhere Achel, Chimay, Orval, Rochefort, Westmalle and Westvleteren produce a specific style (or range of styles) unique to them in the traditional “triple” and “double” beers which are the results, respectively, of the first and second soakings of the mash, and are thrice and twice as strong as the third, a “small beer.” The former – rich, strong and complex – are, along with an upstart “quadruple” style, among the finest things a brewer can do.

witbier – Hoegaarden, the brand that got the whole white beer wave started, was set up by Pierre Celis who subsequently moved to the USA and became something of a cult figure among brewers of cloudy ales. It’s the biggest brand, now owned by AB Inbev, flavoured with bitter orange peel and coriander seed (and perfectly OK, as long as you have some lemon to cut the soapiness)

wicked beers – the late Michael Jackson – no, not that one, but the ur-beer writer – came up with the term to plug the gap in the nomenclature for a bunch of beers made to flatter Moortgat’s peerless Duvel (pronounced Doov’l and literally “Devil” after an early guinea-pig apparently pronounced it a “devil of a beer.”) From Flanders, with it’s light body and billowing head it looks like a lager but it’s top-fermented to 8.5% abv – you’d never guess, until it’s too late. (It’s little brother Vedett is a saintly 5.2% abv, by the way.) Other good ‘uns are from Abbaye des Rocs, Achouffe, Anker, De Proef, De Struise, Drei Fonteinen, Alken-Maes (Grimbergen), Lefèbvre, Proef, St. Bernardus and not least Mort Subite (but at least I’d be dying happy in the peerless perfection of their Brussels bar)

The by-product of yeast invisibly replicating itself is our beery bounty and that fungal fecundity gives us one of our most important preservative processes. The “ploughman’s lunch” may have originated as a cheesy bit of ’70s advertising copy but those horny-handed tillers of the sod would be eating the cheese-free version without the wonder that is fermentation. There would be no bread, pickles or beer either – so not much of a lunch at all, in fact.

The process of brewing may be longer and more complex than that of winemaking but the end-product is less complex. Don’t get me wrong – there is no man alive who loves beer more than I (or if there is, he should seek therapy immediately) but the beauty of beer is in some way in its very simplicity and straightforwardness, its honesty. If we want complexity then it is to be found in the huge palette of styles and flavours … a doom-dark dunkels doppel-bock is beer just as the lightest, laciest of lagers is beer and their footholds are analagous to those of, say, port and prosecco in the wine branch of the family tree of booze.

To make either of them the grain – inavariably barley, but wheat beer is big (I mean BIG) in Germany – is first soaked to induce the germination process and begin the release of the complex sugars locked up in the grains: after drying it’s further “kilned” to turn it into “malt” and the degree to which this is done determines much of the character of the beer – the darker the roast the darker the beer; after getting rid of the tiny sprouts from that brief germination period the malt is milled into “grist,” which then briefly becomes “mash” while it’s soaked in hot water in a mash tun before the liquid, now called “wort,” is separated and transferred to a brewing copper for the addition of the other three ingredients- water, hops and yeast. The purity and balance of minerals in the former is critical and almost mystical qualities are attributed by some brewers to the properties of the water they use – they get bored, I imagine, and pissed, of course.

No doubting the influence of the hops, though, – these primæval frilly pine cone-shaped green flowers are little resinous hand-grenades of super-charged bitterness and provide the descant flavour notes to malt’s baritone. They grow on vines (but called bines, like you have a heavy cold) in Kentish hop-gardens. They smell remarkably like their cousin marijuana – so they tell me – and have antiseptic, anti-inflammatory and preservative qualities in addition to their contribution to flavour. Discussion of the variety (the best-known English variety is Golding while Czech Saaz are the most revered), their preparation – dried or fresh (“wet-hopped”) and heady with resin – and the timing of incorporation (“late-hopped” for maximum impact) are matter for almost devout nerdism.

There is a myriad, a plethora, a cornucopia of ways of making – and tweaking – beer. Unfortunately, such things as myriads, plethoras and cornucopiae have a tendency to attract clouds of obscurantists, obfuscators and sophists. “I wanna go to an inn for some ale,” announced an in-coming Yank-in-law once, prompting the whispered conflab: “What the hell is ale? And what’s an inn?” We know in our bellies what they are but the unmemorable answer is that ales (the original beers) are top-fermented, i.e the yeast does its business on the surface of the brew. New-fangled lagers, devised only in 1842 in Plzen, Czechoslovakia as the first crystal-clear, light-coloured beer before going on to colonise the globe in double-quick time are made with bottom-fermenting yeasts and aged (“lagered”) for a period before consumption.

Bottle-conditioned beers have a little unfermented sugar remaining when bottled so undergo a second fermentation – a bit like Champagne – and they need careful pouring not to disturb the sediment (Worthington White Shield). All sorts of other ingredients are used from time to time, not necessarily to the detriment of the brew, both in the grist – rice, oatmeal, maize wheat – as well for manipulating body and alcoholic strength (sugar) and for flavouring – fruit, fruit peel, and herbs and spices like coriander, ginger, saffron and juniper. Don’t know about you, but it’s all making feel rather thirsty.

“Beer is God’s way of telling us that he loves us and wants us to be happy.” Benjamin Franklin is misquoted on all those T-shirts that strain at the seams to contain the consequences of all that love. Indeed, there is often sufficient acreage for the correct version: “Behold the rain which descends from heaven upon our vineyards; there it enters the roots of the vines, to be changed into wine; a constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy” without dropping the point-size.

The love goes back a lot further than revolutionary America though. It has been speculated that the reason that humanity gave up the hunter-gatherer existence and settled for an agrarian life was because they wanted a regular supply of grain – not for the bread they made from it but because what they really wanted was beer.

Anybody loitering in an English town at 10pm on a Friday night might be forgiven for doubting it but there is a compelling case to be made that civilisation was founded on beer – or perhaps founded for beer is more accurate.

The earliest documentary evidence of brewing is from Sumeria, approximately 6000 years ago. There was beer-making activity before that but not much in the way of written language – possibly a cause-and-effect thing was going on there – but by the time of the Egyptians there was a sophisticated beer culture with numerous styles being made and serious consequences for purveyors of duff beer (such as being drowned in it).

It’s a stretch to think of it as such but – if all booze is one great big dysfunctional family – then beer is grain- (or seed-) wine (and, though this may push it too far, its distillate, – whisky – is therefore oak-aged grain schnapps, i.e. vodka).

Beer is much more difficult to make than wine, and only for lack of anything else – or serendipity – would anybody choose hydrolised starch as the base for a wine. Serendipity may have started it in Mesopotamia but the reason it came into its own in Northern latitudes was probably as a solution to the problem of the relative scarcity of fruit. But, in the civilising stroke of genius that was the planting of grain, it overcame the infuriating seasonality and capriciousness of fickle fruit. Grain keeps … fruit doesn’t … beer all year!

When the same wine drinkers spend north of a tenner, they’re probably hoping for something to make their dinner party guests sit up and take notice. I’m not the only sozzled hack who is concerned that people no longer have any idea of what to expect from wines in between those price levels. The £6-10 range can – with careful selection – be a real sweet spot for value as the proportion of the price that actually represents the wine in the bottle, as opposed to taxes and fixed charges like bottling and shipping, rises exponentially with each extra pound spent. The problem is that the big winemakers and the big wine sellers have muddied the waters with so much systematic discounting.

Presumably, very few people are sufficiently taken with a particular wine that has been discounted from, say, £8.99 to £4.49 to subsequently pay the full price when there’s another, similar-seeming bottle from another of the big brands parked next to it which is now apparently on sale at half-price. There are so many that there must seem to be no reason ever to pay more than a fiver or so.

The poor bewildered punter, standing friendless and frequently clueless in the typical four-, five-or six-hundred bottle wine aisle could very easily be forgiven for asking themselves whether any wine can actually be worth seven or eight or nine quid or are they risking – in buying one – falling into the elephant trap that is the zombie, “un-discounted” wine? The answer, of course, is that there are many but so advanced is the erosion of confidence in that price-bracket that only careful selection or – better yet – buying from independent merchants can offer relief.

So there are two basic rules of thumb: the first is that the the better the wine is the smaller any discount is likely to be and the second is that any wine discounted by 50% (or more! – there are a few out there right now …) is probably only ever worth the discounted price in the first place.

Obviously, many wine merchants and supermarkets will deliver wine to you – by mail or other means – and, with most retailers having an on-line presence, the definition of “mail order” is very blurred these days. But there are differences in what the purely mail order and online merchants and wine clubs do, chief among them being that often the wines are “pre-selected” and if that sounds alarming it’s because most of the time it is. The sector – with about 5% of the UK market – is bestridden by Direct Wines, set up by Tony Laithwaite in 1969. They run The Sunday Times Wine Club, Telegraph Wines, Averys, British Airways Executive Wine Club, Virgin Wines – which was started by Rowan Gormley, who now runs Naked Wines – and of course Laithwaite’s itself (formerly Bordeaux Direct). I’m relieved that their Barclaycard Wine Service appears to be defunct because even the idea of having a credit card company that charges up to 27.9% interest against a base rate of half of one per cent choosing anybody’s wine gives me the willies. Dunno if the Richard and Judy Wine Club is still going. Don’t care either.

All of them have some good wines but they’re unlikely to send them if you don’t ask for them – why would they? Importantly, there has been a uptick in quality generally from some of their outfits and the fact that – to the astonishment of many in the trade – a couple of years ago Laithwaite’s took a delivery of their own in the form of Justin Howard-Sneyd MW from Waitrose, where as head of wine he took their list from primus inter pares among the grocers to nobody-in-second-place. Hopefully this signalled a seriousness of intent as far as quality is concerned. They don’t generally do anything much under six quid – presumably distribution costs are too high. (From Laithwaite’s, try Alegria Old Vines Cariñena £6.99, Alma Andina Torrontès- Sauvignon Blanc £7.99, Giesta Dão 2010 £6.99 – all by-the-case prices. A few favourites from Virgin: Ca’ di Ponti Grillo Sicily £6.99; Araldica Piemonte Barbera £6.99 Hans Lang Rhengau Riesling Kabinett Trocken £10.99; Juan Gil Monastrell £9.99).

I haven’t tried anything at all from Naked as they don’t seem to have much under 7 quid unless you subscribe as an “Angel” and agree to a regular £20 payment per month. The angel angle is that they “invest in independent winemakers” and the regular payment means you “get better wines for supporting winemakers directly.” Hmmm.

The original mail order merchant, The Wine Society, is a very different kettle of fish.  Founded as a co-operative company in 1874 by a “committee of gentlemen” at the Albert Hall with the purpose of purchasing wines in “unadulterated condition” direct from the producers and offering them to the membership at the lowest possible price, it still does the very same. Another of the `Objects of the Society’ was `To introduce foreign wines hitherto unknown or but little known in this country’ and they were selling Californian Zinfandels and Australian wines 100 years ago, which is rather impressive. Anyone can join but forget the Groucho Marx line about not wanting to join any club that would have him – the quality of the wines is very high. My own Eureka! moment with wine was a Sancerre from the Wine Soc which had – alongside the usual quality of being a reasonably efficient inebriant – the hitherto unknown one of being completely delicious.

The Society’s White Burgundy is a fine thing for £7.50 and tells you everything you need to know about their standards. Down – but not dirty – at the Grogan’s Heroes price-level their Chilean Merlot  (£5.95) is made by Concha y Toro’s charming and dynamic (no, I don’t fancy him – well, not much anyway) Marcelo Papa. He’s one of the most important winemakers on the planet right now – one of a small number of people who are changing everything and I doubt that anybody makes more wine better than he does. It’s a big, fresh, rich, bright, saturated, minerally, fruit-cakey thing but not at all o.t.t. As for his Chilean Chardonnay – from cool-breezy Limarí -  I just hope I don’t get given it to taste blind because I  might get carried away.

Of the new(ish) wave of internet-only merchants, Swig and Slurp stand out (they’re separate entities, as evidenced by the third person plural, and anyway who would  name their business with a tautology?).   I felt a little thrill when I clicked on Swig‘s “Best Sellers” list and the first item on it was A.A. Badenhorst’s “Secateurs” Chenin Blanc from South Africa – sad, or what? – but it was one of the most exciting wines I tasted last year. According to their search criteria prices start at £7.95 so they won’t be troubling Grogan’s Heroes at the moment but they do have some very nice wine.

You can tell an awful lot about a wine by the company it keeps (and vice-versa) and although I don’t know much about Slurp I do know quite a few of their (relative) cheapies from some of our Local Hero merchants –  Ancora, Alpha Zeta and A Mano among them. Blimey, that’s just the ‘A’s! I’d better get on to them sharpish – see you later!

After 19 years of wedded bliss, Valentine’s Day is not what it used to be. Come to think of it, I’m not sure it ever was what it used to be. I’ve missed the last three (there is a God) but this year – for the same reason – I got off a red-eye from Los Angeles mid-afternoon on the 14th. Club Class  (“because I’m worth it”) notwithstanding, a shag was going to be, as they say, out of the question.

Nonetheless, I still had the strength in me to open a bottle or two. For fizz, and with an eye to ameliorating a fraction of the cost of that ticket, I plumped for stylish Pongrácz Rosé from South Africa. The design of the bottle alone is worth the money but the seductive strawberry fruit makes you wonder if it’s worth paying three times the price to have the word “Champagne” on the label.

For even less, it should be noted that Australian sparkler Griffith Park, which won a blind tasting by Which? magazine a couple of years ago against some, er, stiff opposition is still upstanding and setting a bench-mark for bargain fizz.

I wasn’t up to much in the way of dinner so had a couple of puddings instead. I surprised my soulmate (and, believe me, after 19 years you have to work on the surprises) with an English sticky. Yes, an English sticky – from Chapel Down, a delicate, late harvest number by the name of Nectar, made from a mix of unpronounceable German grapes and weighing in at a feather-light 8% abv. It’s the first English sticky I’ve liked and I’d drink it with the usual suspects or on its own but – in either case – with pleasure.

It is the diametric opposite of Harvey’s PX – the other pudding choice – and who would ever guess that they were made from the same basic stuff? This is a treacle-rich toffee-fest and it’s double the abv but deep within in it there’s still a streak of the same limey acidity that they share in their DNA and which makes sense of it all. Who knows – another glass and anything could have happened.

At Lucky Baldwin’s – and just what Baldwin did in another life to get this lucky can only be guessed at – the beers were consulted and cajoled upon, and then served forth, by – embarassing though this may be – what can only be realistically described as some sort of household goddess. And one that I now know and praise as being of an emergent pantheon of craft-brew beeresses that Zappa would have written not just three words but whole albums about. Sarah wouldn’t even have been born, or thought of, when Dylan wrote his hymn to her so there’s another glorious mystery, but now she is here below amongst us.

I don’t remember the names of the beers with which she bathed my sins away (mere trivia, but hops do have an antiseptic quality – *yawn*) so I may have to slink back later on to retrieve a list as mine was sodden to pulp by the time we left. But this I know: Frank was right. The way, the life and the truth – it’s all here – just give the boys “titties and beer”.

It’s an ill wind alright. The demise of the high-street chains in the ‘noughties saw a profoundly encouraging spate of start-ups of small, independent wine merchants devoting themselves to purveying carefully-selected, high-quality wines across (almost) the whole price range. More encouraging still is that a number of them are cautiously expanding. Most deliver nationwide but if you’re fortunate to have one nearby it adds something special if you can walk in and have a nice chat and, often, a nice glass of wine as well – some of them seem to be in permanent tasting mode, with a few bottles open all the time. No names, no pack drill – it’s a hard life for some of these chaps (eh, Marc?).

Some have the Enomatic storage and dispensing systems which allow them to offer customers (and casuals) the chance try before they buy and, better yet, to taste high-end wines in small doses without the wine deteriorating (or breaking the bank). Basically, you put some credit on a card they give which you use to pay for a small (but not necessarily tiny – they come in different measures) glass of a few (or all) of the dozen or so wines they have “on taste” as they say in the States. Others have a corkscrew and some glasses. And maybe a fridge.

(Selfridges pioneered Enomatic in the UK, only to find that silly Westminster Council refused – and persisted in refusing until quite recently – to countenance the sale of wine in “non-standard” measures like 5cl. It shows just the sort of flexibilty and forward-thinking that we’ve come to expect from our dynamic local government people, doesn’t it?)

When I was writing my book, I would have been lucky to find more than a handful of the 3500-odd recommended wine producers in it in my patch of north London. But three excellent places have opened up in Stokie in the past 18 months and I recently did a piece for the (equally excellent) local mag – N16 Magazine – to see how many I could find now.  I stopped counting at 100. None of the new places are solely dedicated to booze, which may be one of the ways forward – Le Parc and MeatN16 also sell food and Homa is a restaurant with a side-line in off-sales.

Elsewhere in London, among my favourite local heroes are (in no particular order) Planet of the Grapes, Vinoteca, Highbury Vintners, The Bottle Apostle and The Sampler. Longer-established Jeroboams, Roberson and Philglass & Swiggot also deserve the same plaudits. Out in the sticks, The Secret Cellar (Tunbridge Wells, Wadhurst and Oxted), The Butler’s Wine Cellar, Quaff, Ten Green Bottles  (all in Brighton), Cooden Cellars (have a guess), South Downs Cellars (Hurstpierpoint and Lindhurst), Fareham Cellars (is “eponymous” correct in this context), Noel Young (Cambridge), Symposium, (Lewes), Wine Therapy (Cowes) and Corks Out (Warrington) deserve particular praise – and there are many more. Let me know if you have one that I should know about. There’s no point in recommending individual wines because all these fine folk only sell good wine, which is rather refreshing. The Association of Direct Wine Merchants brings together some up-and-coming and decidedly individualistic folk too so, with just a minimum of effort you really never need open a dull bottle again.

Some of the advantages of buying wine by the mixed case are:

that they do all the work of weeding out the dull stuff – their reputations rest on the quality of the wines they choose and as a result, they get more interesting wines, often from small, individual producers who care about what they’re making;

that many sell pre-selected mixed cases at many price-levels so you don’t have to know anything about wine to make a start; that they sell wine at (nearly) all price levels and for mid-range wines they can be cheaper than the supermarkets and multiples;

that there really isn’t much snobbery involved unless you want there to be;

that you don’t have to schlep the stuff about. Having a case on hand gives you the luxury of choice – “Sweetie, do you think this Chilean Merlot or the Lalande de Pomerol would go better with these bangers?”

The objection that you have to shell out for 12 bottles at a time doesn’t hold water since that money was going to be spent on wine sooner or later anyway. The proof of the pudding is that:

nobody who ever started buying by the case from good merchants ever stopped without a good reason (which, basically, means penury, liver disease or death – and only the last of these is good enough).

As confidence increases you can begin to have the fun of scouting their lists – they make mistakes and mistakes are better than discounts and “sales” where there is often a good reason for cutting the price – good for them, that is.

I learned much of whatever I know about wine from bottles bought from the top merchants who comprise the loose alliance called The Bunch, i.e. Tanners of Shrewsbury, Berry Brothers & Rudd, Adnams of Southwold, Yapp Brothers, Corney and Barrow and newbies Lea and Sandeman. They’re all good but – with so much dynamic new competition – none can rest on their laurels: while one has newly established itself as the best of the bunch, one has become rather expensive, another has been rather distracted by other projects, one is a bit stuck in the mud and another is quite uneven quality-wise.

Until as recently as the ’70s wine merchants imported wine in cask and bottled it themselves and the tradition lives on in the form of merchants’ “house” wines, although thankfully they are all bottled at source these days. They’re a big part of their business, their “calling cards” almost, and they usually offer exceptional value. There’s some cachet in having the name of an illustrious wine merchant on the label I suppose but it’s what’s in the bottle that really counts and the wines are often made by leading producers and châteaux. Some of the old guard of merchants like Berry’s and Justerini & Brooks (now Diageo-owned since they bought the J&B whisky brand) have relationships with individual châteaux that go back into the 18th century.

Some ranges runs to as many as 60 bottles – including Ports, sherries and Madeira – and the name of a top merchant on the bottle is about as close as wine gets to coming with a guarantee – it’s the consumer-end version of the handshakes on which, refreshingly, a lot of the wine trade is still run. Some people object in principle to the fact that the “everyday” merchants’ wines are often non-vintage – i.e. a blend of wines from different vintages – but that’s the tradition and, in practice, when they actually taste these fruits of the blenders’ art the objections are seldom sustained.

High Street UK is not a good place to buy wine and it hasn’t been for a long time.  As far as offies are concerned, the tumbleweed proliferated a couple of years ago with the collapse  of First Quench – not surprising, really, with a name like that – the company that owned the 1,200 Threshers, Wine Rack, The Local and Haddows shops. It could be fairly said that they discounted themselves to death. The wines generally weren’t up to much anyway so on the whole it was good riddance.

It hardly seems possible that a whole generation can have graduated with an NVQ in binge-drinking and been rewarded with its first Asbo without ever knowing why old people have such a soft spot for Oddbins. The company went tits-up last year after a brief period in the hands of the son of the man who started it, after having been bought and sold a few times, lastly by French giant Castel, the biggest wine company in Europe (and owners of the useful Nicolas chain). In the ‘eighties Oddbins awakened millions of Brits to the fact that wine could actually taste nice and it’s encouraging that the residual 39 branches (under still newer ownership) show signs of doing what the original company did best. It’s early days but, at the risk of sounding like a dickhead, the fact that they are stocking wines from a decent number of the smaller, quality-conscious producers recommended in my book (like Viu Manent, Henry Fessy, Redfin, Tedeschi, Caves de Hunawihr, San Marzano, Setencostas and McHenry Hohnen) bodes well.

In similar vein, the remaining 20 or so Wine Rack shops in and around London, again under new ownership, seem to be far more focussed on quality than in their previous incarnation. With wines from the likes of De Bortoli, Simmonet-Febvre, Keuntz-Bas, Louis Latour, Louis Jadot, Meerlust and Vergelegen – to name a few – you need not fear or shun them.

The steadily burning light in UK town centres – although not often on the high street itself – is Majestic Wine who maintain a consistently high standard while experimenting with the gaps on the street by doing things like reducing their minimum purchase from 12 to six bottles. The range is large and includes many excellent producers – too many to mention here – but some top-class cheapies (under £6 on special offer until Monday 30 Jan) are, among the whites, Wither Hills, Esperanza, and Neblina (all Sauvignon Blanc), Luis Felipe Edwards Chardonnay, Undurraga Brut Rosé and, among the reds, Rioja Reserva Viña Eguia, Ch. Mont Milan Corbières, Flichman “Gestos” Malbec, Neblina Merlot and Luis Felipe Edwards Cabernet Sauvignon. If there is a quibble, it’s a tendency towards discounting that risks being not a million miles from the sort of thing that so confuses consumers in the supermarkets. Remember what happened to First Quench ..?