BeerBasics visits...

Sam Calgione & Marnie Olds

authors of

"He said beer She said wine"

From Left - Marnie Olds Olds, LaFrance LaFrance and Sam Calagione Calagion

On a rainy afternoon recently I had the chance to get together with Sam Calagione Calagione and Marnie Olds Olds the co-authors of He said beer,She said wine. The book grew out of the events that both of them had been holding where they are paired a particular dish with both a beer and wine. , after a four course meal, was to determine the, who won: beer or wine. After reading the book, I had to admit that the combative concept did catch my attention. I was much more interested in the similarities between beer and wine and with that in mind, I set up the following interview.

The interview was held in what is called the Chelsea Food Market, a number of food and produce stores situated in what used to be film studios. The interior, exposed brick walls hypes and electrical fittings, seems more subterranean to me than friendly. Nevertheless, I soldiered on and made my appointment.

And so, seated at the end of a long folding table, Sam Calagione, Marnie Olds and I jumped into the beer and wine controversy.

 Rather than maintaining the combative spirit of the book, I decided to see where there was cooperation. The first question, for Marnie Olds, got things rolling…

LaFrance: Who other than Sam Calagione has been the greatest influence on your interest and appreciation of beer?

Marnie Olds: That would be my husband who was homebrewing at one point and trying to convince me back when I was working in fine dining restaurants, that beer really had something serious to offer beyond the bland yellow stuff. And I honestly didn’t take him that seriously at first. I just thought he was the nutty old crank in the kitchen… I remember back then that he used to tell me that he couldn’t drink wine because wine gave him a headache. He loved beer, he still loves beer, and he has always liked beer. He grew up around beer, his father is Pennsylvania Dutch, and that whole culture is very steep in the German tradition of beer every day.

I remember the day he came out of the bathroom clutching one of my trade magazines from the wine business, at this point I was becoming a significant sommelier in Philadelphia, and he just looked at me and said “You know, I don’t think I can avoid becoming a wine expert. You are dragging me into this kicking and screaming.” and of course now he likes wine as much as he likes beer but he still drinks beer every day.

LaFrance: So he was the other influence?

Marnie Olds: (Laughter) His interest in it was what led me to look beyond the 90% of beer that is all the same. And frankly as a sommelier in a restaurant I was at the stage where I had to take responsibility for beverages beyond wine, which I was interested in and passionate about.

At first, I confess I treated beer with the same kind of “Ho-hum, oh darn I have to do this… “ mentality that I treated vodka and bottled water and other things that I didn’t really approve of…  It didn’t take me long before I realized that there was a lot more going on about beer and beer had many of the things that I found so fascinating about wine and… because it is another one of the fermented beverages, the same way that cider and sake have layers of flavors that go way beyond that of vodka. The same thing is true of beer. So, he is the one who helped me to notice it at first but then my professional interests kicked in and I began and I took it to the next step because I was responsible for crafting entire beverage programs.

LaFrance: Now Sam Calagione… Who influenced you, other than Marnie Olds, significantly in your appreciation of wine?

Calagione:

The answer may seem very strange but was actually Michael Jackson who introduced me to wine at a Rare Beer Club (event), he had a sister club which was a Rare Wine Club.

They did a dinner out of San Francisco and a bunch of the Ventnor’s that were members of the red wine club came to that event. Before I met these folks through Michael Jackson I would usually just go with the Merlot. That was about as extensive as my wine knowledge got.  But then I got to know about the Pinot Noir style when I went out with Michael and learning that so many of the good Pinot Noirs come from Washington and Oregon the same place hops come from I said if I’m going to start drinking wines I’ll start drinking wines from the hop growing regions. So now I’m a bit of a Pinot Noir snob… I got that way before Sideways came to the screen.

Marnie Olds: Aw, gee now I’m going to have to introduce you to the German Rieslings is so that you can support the German hop regions as well.

Sam Calagione: Aren’t those the wines that are rather sweet?

Marnie Olds: Some of them sweet some of them are dry… you would like them.

LaFrance: Sam… When where and what wine was it that you tasted when you came to the realization that wine was something fantastic rather than something you just had to drink?

Sam Calagione: Where I actually enjoyed it you mean? To be perfectly honest my epiphany came early on because I came from a large Italian family and we grew up watching my uncles and my father make wine. (They weren’t evolved enough in that generation to make beer… so they did what they could with grapes.) The memory of some of the relatives standing around the winepress drinking a little bit of it and made a little bit of it, I remember as a little boy seeing how much joy it brought and its ability to bring people together. I remember thinking what a wonderful thing it would be making a living doing these… making fermented beverages for a living.

Marnie is always giving me grief because she knows that my history with wine goes back further than my history with beer.

 LaFrance: This one is for you Marnie… When where and what beer was it that caused your beer epiphany?

Marnie Olds:

This would be going back to the early 1990s. It must’ve been ‘94 or ‘95 when my husband and I were having dinner at Monks Café in Philadelphia. He had dragged me out to show me some of the special styles of beer that he had just started convincing me were worth my time. I cruised through the beer bible which is their extensive list organized by style and region.

I picked out a style that thought was interesting to me it was the Rhodenbach Grand Cru. It came in the large 750 mL bottle and we shared it. We had it with with duck confit salad and skirt steak with pommes frites. And for a wine drinker tasting one of the sour Flemish style beers really snapped home how similar these products can really be. That lactic acidity that the Rhodenbach brings to the table has so many of the assets and pairings links that wine brings to the table.  That was a real eye-opener to me. That bottle of beer was the epiphany for me, yes.

Sam Calagione: What style of wine would you say that the Rhodenbach Grand Cru comes closest to?

Marnie Olds: I would say a Pinot Noir or Chianti… the lighter bodied high acid red wines that come from Burgundy or Tuscany.

LaFrance: Marnie, What have been the most enjoyable and least enjoyable aspects of this project?

Marnie Olds: The most enjoyable aspect of this project I think has been talking to consumers in the course of our offense you know Sam Calagione and I are really in this out for the same thing we are both proselytizing about our is particular products.   Sam Calagione of course is associated with dogfish head. My role as an educator is very similar on the side of wine but not associated with any particular winery. I am out there teaching people how to appreciate wine. I think beer and wine have been pigeonholes probably because of their history. Beer certainly gets a bad rap as the kind of cheap swill of the masses. Wine gets a bad rap as the stuck up refined beverage of the elite. I don’t think the stereotypes are as true now as they were in the past. The greatest fun for me is working with Sam Calagione to tear down the stereotypes. And I really think that those stereotypes are not as true now as they have been in the past.

The greatest fun for me is working with Sam Calagione to tear the stereotypes down talking to consumers and helping them recognize what a wonderful family wine and beer really are they are much closer than people would realize.

The least enjoyable would probably be doing dinners with Sam Calagione and occasionally losing the popular vote of which one is the better food partner, beer or wine. Now I’m sure Sam Calagione feels the same way when beer loses to the wine. For sommelier to stand up and aroma of approximately 100 people and in a fine dining restaurant and acknowledge that wine has lost the vote at the end of the day.

LaFrance: Sam Calagione… the same question. What was the most enjoyable and least enjoyable aspect of this project?

Sam Calagione: I have a lot of the same impressions as Marnie. I think the specific moments that I enjoy most are when you see a person who has come to a dinner who are very vocal about their particular beverage and come to the dinner with a bias and then saying them with at least one of the courses actually have to pay attention to their palette rather than their bias and have to admit that this is one time that “my beverage” didn’t win. And that’s a double-edged sword because sometimes they come in his hard-core beer people and with a particular course, they might say “I do think I liked champagne, but with that course that actually works better.”

The best moment is watching other people have their own personal epiphanies and the worst is when that epiphany leads them to the other side.

LaFrance: How many chefs have you worked with or met who were not open to wine and beer?

Marnie Olds: 

I’ve worked with two older generation chefs in their late 40s to early 50s, who were a little bit unwilling to recognize beers potential. But in both cases, I don’t think it was because they didn’t like beer.  I think it was more because their concern for the bottom line and a shortsighted idea that providing customers with less expensive beverage such as beer in their restaurants would hurt their business long-term. I happen to disagree with, as I’ve written extensively about that for trade magazines. But I have seen that mindset in action among chefs and restaurateurs.

LaFrance: How would you compare it to when you started out?

Marnie Olds:

I think that that mindset is melting away. On the flip side, I’ve encountered some young chefs, most recently, less than 30 years old, who have a similar bias in the other direction. Who are firmly in favor of having wine list and their restaurants because they know that’s what expected (and where they make their keep, and so on) who personally will try to argue with me that wine can’t come close to beers food pairing potential. And in most cases I find this is due to inexperience. I find that the chefs have tried world-class beers with food, but have never tried world-class wines with food. And then making their judgments based on a limited sphere of experience.

LaFrance: How has customer knowledge changed since you have started working together? (7 years)

Sam Calagione: If you go back seven years ago that was in the kind of shake out era in the craft beer renaissance.  When the bloom was off the rose and people were starting to say that maybe this craft beer thing is just a fad. I know my brewery suffered through some hard years when there were too many similar products out there and frankly not all of them were of the highest quality. I think a lot of people got scarred when they chose him beers back then that weren’t well-made or had been sitting on a shelf for year two. That experience sent them back to the giant brewery beers for the imports. They would rather spend more money on a beer that came from Europe then a small batch beer. So that was a pretty tenuous era. If you flash forward to today there are over 1,400 breweries in America and almost every one of them is making great beer. Perhaps not all of them and making world-class beer but you will rarely find a poorly made beer on the market. Economic Darwinism took care of that…

So I think that the consumer today is a much better position to have confidence and experimenting with a wide breadth of beers that are out there instead of just going back to the names of the major brewers that they know well. There is never been a better time to be a beer consumer in America.

LaFrance: What’s it like in the rest of the world in the rest of the world in the part of the United States that doesn’t really understand fine dining?

Marnie Olds: I find that what starts in New York moves in land… it’s not just New York obviously it’s Chicago and San Francisco to a certain degree that are kind of like the coasts; East west and north from which everything else moves central In terms of beverage trends.

LaFrance: Is it moving? How fast is it moving? And how far as it moved?

Marnie Olds: Absolutely it’s moving! If you go from New York to Philadelphia you’ll find that Philadelphia is four or five years behind what’s happening in the food world of New York. And Pittsburgh is five years behind Philadelphia and so on is to move towards the central breadbasket of the United States. Even in Texas were starting to find tremendous strides being made in exposing people to imports. And they’re all soul numbers of people who are willing to try the different styles of wine outside of the Steak House Classics.

Sam Calagione: My take on that is, as Marty said wine is made in a much smaller area, geographically, whereas the average American lives within 10 miles of the local brewery. For that reason there are pockets outside of supposedly sophisticated culinary cities that we just talked about that have really great beer cultures.  Boston comes to mind, Chicago in Texas, we never thought Florida would be a top market for us… and even in Ashville, NC there is the Highlander Brewery… and in these pockets is usually driven by an extremely ambitious brewery for example; Bell’s in Kalamazoo Michigan has put that place on the map as a beer Mecca. To some extent Milton Delaware, who would’ve thought that one of the most successful mid-Atlantic Brewers would be headquartered in Delaware? So we are thankfully we can actually affect the beer culture in these towns and cities which are far outside the traditional culinary hotbeds in the cities.

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