{Wine, It's What's for Dinner, Part III}

Let's call this edition the “sticks and stones” edition....

In a survey published a while back in the Journal of Wine Research, Tim Unwin noted that the words people most associated with beer were “pub,” “men,” “louts,” and “belly” (as in “beer” not “six-pack”). Beer was also “positively associated with increased laziness.”

That's harsh. Wine’s words, by comparison, 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 we know? Would advertising lie?

Indeed, thanks to the relentless drumbeat of advertising, our perceptions about alcohol are set into cultural stone years before we’re even old enough to drink (legally). TV lays out the bio of the average American beer drinker in no uncertain terms: 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.

Of course, this portrayal of beer drinkers as baffoonish 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 end up coming between a man and his cold Bud. Like a genetic trigger, the sight of a sweating bottle of brew is meant to trump even the sexual impulse, luring the man toward it, saucer-eyed and salivating. Beer is masturbation. Wine is foreplay.