Slate has an article about the ascendancy of wine over beer. The article is interesting, but some of the claims don't make any sense to me.

The new wine grammar, popularized foremost by the American critic Robert Parker, sounds like a really weird grocery list, privileging flavor over domain: notes of blackcurrant, eucalyptus, tobacco. As annoying as this new pastoral language of wine can be, it's certainly more democratic-sounding, less forbidding. It trades one set of referents that Americans view suspiciously and uneasily—class—for another that, even when we haven't the foggiest notion of what it signifies (Chokecherry, anyone? Lychee?), sure sounds nice. Call it the consumer pastoral.

I really don't see how the grammar has increased interest in wine. If anything, the fact that Parker used a point-scoring system makes more sense. Most wine shops I visit don't focus on the text of the review, just the number.

He also skips over the role that grocery stores have played in increasing wine consumption by making wine easily accessible to shoppers. The role that quality low-cost wines from Australia have played in increasing American consumption is also ignored.

Then there is this:

But it's more than a question of switching terminology. Wine is basically an agricultural product (fermented grapes), while beer is the result of a complicated process of manufacture (boiling barley to extract sugars, adding hops and yeast, fermenting the wort that results).

Mr. Maloney has obviously never made wine. Aside from the fact that he completely ignores blended wines, aging, oak vs non-oak, and even whether not the winemaker allows fermentation to occur naturally or helps it out with chemicals all play an important role in the final product. Yes, no amount of chemistry is going to mask the true nature of the grape, nor should it, but wine is a lot more than just crushing some grapes and waiting.

In fact, you can trace the United States' shift from an agrarian society to an urban, industrial one through beer. In the Colonial era, settlers drank mostly hard cider (the rural drink of choice), rum, and whiskey.

The rise in the popularity of beer coincided with the temperance movement in this country. Whiskey and rum have a high alcohol content, beer has a low alcohol content. As temperance became more popular (a mistake which I hope this country never repeats) people drank less hard liquor.