Malcolm Gluck is a well-known wind-up merchant who likes to pretend he’s the people’s wine critic, but his claim on The Guardian’s website here, in what appears to be a return to the paper after he fell out with it some time ago, that
Wine in Britain today is vivacious, fruity, inexpensive, healthy (in moderation) and fun. Beer, on the other hand, is drunk by losers and sadsacks.
is trollery at its ugliest and most repulsive. Still, in eight hours he managed to attract more than 60 commenters telling him what a wanker he was …
As I said in my own comment, “How very sad that this could be written in one of the greatest brewing nations in the world, even in jest. Malcolm, you’re badly dissing the thousands of dedicated people who work in Britain’s 550-plus new small breweries, and its surviving family brewers, producing world-beating beers. I can’t understand how any professional drinks writer could write something that appeared to show he knew nothing about what was happening at places such as Meantime in Greenwich, Thornbridge in Derbyshire or BrewDog in Scotland, to name only three.”
Hey, fair points here I think. As much as stuff like this, even done in jest, attracts a load of traffic, it’s not worth pissing people off in the end. It still surprises me how many people take it all so seriously. Thanks for an interesting comment …
Geez what LOSER that person is, from a country that i identify as a great beer country.
Wines certainly have their place, but Beer does to!
Pale Ale, Porters and Stouts! Come ON!
unless this is a colloquialism this may say is all:
“When I became a professional booze hack…”
“professional hack”
Dave of California [a place that seems to live in peaceful harmony of wine and beer ?] lol
Susan, nice to see a Guardian person leave a response, but as I said in a second comment on your site,
there is a huge difference between being provocative and appearing completely ignorant. If The Guardian reported beer properly we might forgive Malcolm his little jest. But it doesn’t, and this just comes across as a stupid slap in the face. As I’ve said elsewhere on this blog, there has never been a better time to be a beer enthusiast in this country – but you’d never know about it if all you read was The Guardian.
That’s pretty sad that that’s is the kind of coverage beer gets from the wine world there. We’re quite lucky here in New York. The wine writer for the NY Times (Eric Asimov) has done a great deal of coverage on craft beer, recently including coverage of obscure Italian breweries, smaller local brewers as well as proper tasting notes comparing beer styles that are suited to the season.
If any of your readers are interested, his blog also has a number of smaller items on craft ale here in the US and abroad
http://thepour.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/beer-and-ale/
yeah, he’s a douche bag.
Yet another reason why I no longer read the Guardian.
Out of genuine curiosity/ surprise, what are the others?
Someone at the Guardian blogs site really enjoys winding up beer enthusiasts. Last year, Tony Naylor managed to turn an article about the joys of quality lager into an exercise in cheap stereotyping of anyone who drinks anything else. Evidently Naylor (or his editor) still think lager is lager and bitter is bitter and ne’er the twain shall meet.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2008/may/19/lager
Mmmm – I had a go at him too …
“The wine writer for the NY Times (Eric Asimov) has done a great deal of coverage on craft beer, recently including coverage of obscure Italian breweries…”
Eric Asimov is a great writer and a great journalist. And unlike Malcolm Gluck, he writes knowledgeably (and lovingly) about both wine and beer. But I think the “coverage of obscure Italian breweries” in the NYT might have actually been something I wrote:
http://travel.nytimes.com/2008/11/02/travel/02Beer.html
If so, I’m flattered by the mistake.
Gluck is clearly a bell end, but a great deal of interest has been whipped up. Even in Ireland – a country starved of decent beer with little interest in craft beer development – a daytime radio show did a piece on this with a number of beer lovers robustly defending their favourite pint. This can only be good for the craft beer scene in Ireland.
The fact that the guys is clearly a wind-up merchant and gets paid for it really gets me. I thought journos (and by that i mean pros) had integrity. Again, I too stopped reading his work a long time ago. The Guardian should know better.
“It still surprises me how many people take it all so seriously. Thanks for an interesting comment …” ~ Susan Smillie
Due respect, Susan, but it’s a bit like saying only newspaper columnists are real journalists, and everyone else can sod off. Of course it’s going to create a stir — after all, brewers who make a living creating a quality product are certainly offended when their work is dismissed as categorically worse than wine or liquor, especially in such a public forum. You can’t just say things like that and cover it up with, “oh, I was joking.”
What’s next for the Guardian? “I liked black people better as slaves. (Just kidding!)”
I’ll not be reading that publication again.
Joe and Evan, and Martin,
you can see from the number of comments on the article, some 150+ on MG’s, and somewhat less on dear ol’ Rogers.
He’s a comedian, and leave him at that. One should/could be cynical and suggest that he’s aimed at an obvious target and sought noise/traffic and should we rise to that, he’s victorious. I thought it was a very well written article to achieve what it has… certainly bleeding obvious to me what he’s set out to achieve. Hence the reason no comment on his side of the fence.
Slightly deviating – I am involved in both industries – I am always dismayed at the level or insightfulness of the communication afforded to these beverages here in the UK. English Whites are seen as a joke, I won’t soap box what little we have of a beer communication industry here.
Then I go to California, read articles in the Oakland Tribune, SF Chronicle, then there’s the NYT, about beer!!! Long be the day that there is a sensible interesting article ever written in a high calibre paper here. The Oak Aged beer article by Eric Asimov was excellent!
Mind, I did read a nice piece in the Sun, by James May on English Wine.
ho hum.
Evan, I am very sorry about the mistaken byline, but you are correct, the article I was thinking of was yours. In any case, it’s great to have the NYT publishing such high quality stuff on our favourite topic.
Bizarrely, Gluck takes the same attitude with a lot of wines, and is treated with contempt (or just ignored) by the majority of his peers. It infuriates me that he gets paid to write this sort of crap, but I guess it sells.
You know… I was about to say that I wish I could get paid to write that kind of crap… But I don’t. I couldn’t.
There has been some incredibly heavy-handed “Beer is stoopid, wine real GOOD!1!!” pieces written by people who really should have known better. Natalie Maclean, for instance, as Jack Curtin related towards the end of this page: http://www.jackcurtin.com/liquiddiet/Archive/May07.htm. Makes you wonder what they’re thinking.
I’m afraid he’s had the last laugh, as he’s provoked exactly the kind of reaction he was looking for.
I don’t see why you, Martyn, and other beer writers got so worked up about this.
I know I shouldn’t let him wind me up, Jeff, but it angers me that when he’s given a platform likethe Guardian to perform on, some people might take him seriously.
It’s so sad how desperately low the standard of journalistic writing has fallen, even on the Guardian. Gluck clearly doesn’t have a clue and neither does the editor who commissioned him.
Gluck is a yuck who’s a silly f*uck with no pluck. An idiotic hooligan in the trappings of a wine writer. Without a scrap of sense concerning either wine or beer. Ignore him and his legacy will evaporate into the nasty sediment that he routinely licks out of his wine glasses.
Malcolm was my boss in advertising for a while. He’s a clever man and he likes to wind up stupid people with tongue in cheek hyperbole