At the moment, I'm writing a story where a romantic dinner for two is paired with a red wine...a burgundy? Is burgundy a type of wine? My husband said it was a color, but he doesn' tknow any more than I do (he thinks he does but he doesn't).

More generally, I have found myself stuck on alcoholic beverages throughout my writing career. I hate beer and have no idea what kinds there are, what colors they are, whether they are good warm or cold, and who would drink them. What's a poor man's beer? A rich man's?

And wines...whit wine goes with fish and red wine goes with red pasta, but that's about as much as I know. Do you chill them? What's an expensive wine and what's a cheap wine? What do you have with dinner and what with dessert?

Then, of course, there are hard liquors and mixed drinks to ask about, but perhaps we should take this in doses so I don't get confused.

White wine is generally chilled and red wine is generally not. As for cheap vs expensive, I don't think there's any one kind of wine that's generally expensive vs cheap, and most wines don't have a lot of name recognition. Well, Boone's Farm on the cheap wino-in-the-gutter side. Wine in a box is generally scorned by wine snobs.

Wine with dinner can be either red or white. Dessert wines are usually sweeter and I think white or rose (pink). I know almost nothing about matching food to wine - for advice on the subject, call a fancy French restaurant in your area and ask to talk to the sommelier - he's the wine dude. Call in the middle of the afternoon, not during dinner.

Beer is usually cold. It's my understanding that in the UK at least some beer is served warm, but here, it's cold. Generally the cheap beer is what you see advertised on TV: Bud Light, Miller Lite, Pabst Blue Ribbon (PBR), etc, and are marketed to horny guys who watch sports. They are pale yellow in color.

If you need a snootier beer, go with some kind of microbrew. There's a wide range of colors, flavors, and styles, ranging from very dark to very light.

Those are really really broad questions! Hopefully that will get you started.

A good wine for dessert could be a rose or blush (I think...)

I don't know much about wine experientially because there are so few that I actually like.

Winos like MD 20/20 ("Mad Dog" 20/20) because it's cheap and has a high alcohol content.

Newbies to wine, like me, prefer sweeter, and those with experience often go for drier (opposite of sweet). Port is a very sweet one, for dessert, not common in the US. Absinthe is illegal in the US because it has hallucinogenic properties (foxglove?), but shows up in Christie books.

Merlot and Chablis, IIRC, are general descriptions, not brands; I'm sure you'd be safe saying "a merlot" regardless of the wealth of your characters.

More than you wanted: http://www.drinkwine.com/

Most beer seems to be $4-$6/six-pack, so you won't find so much class difference in beer. Pabst and Miller are for lowbrows, though. Sam Adams, Corona (you need a squirt of lime juice or they're not so good), Dos Equis, Coors, Yeungling (sp?), Heineken, all pretty much the same in cost. Harp and Bass can be expected in the UK (we got it here too, though); US drinkers take 'em cold, Brits drink it at room temperature. Bud and Bud Lite are maybe lowbrow-ish, but not extremely so. Rolling Rock is like drinking so much water (IMHO). Guinness (Ireland) is like drinking a sandwich. People who like it, swear by it. You can mix it half-and-half with Bass and get something called a "Black and Tan," an ironic name because it also means, I think, British police in Ireland back during oppressive times.

O'Douls is "near beer" (non-alcoholic).

I have sampled quite a few beers from around the world, so I could probably answer many of your questions about it. Robyn_Hood is right, most beers in the United States are drunk cold. I have tried Guiness and Beamish at room temperature, and it was nice. You notice more of the flavor when it is warm, which is why swill like Bud Light, etc, must be chilled to be drinkable.

Mexican beers are generally served with a slice of lime to be squirted in them. This helps cover up the skunky flavor that so many of them have.

I'm sorry to have to say this, but you're in for a whole lot of pain...

You need to remember to write about the after effects of drinking if you plan on doing any scenes the day following the drinking session.

You might need to get somebody to help you write this for you if you're a tea totaller, or use the writing as an excuse to sup a few jars and write how you feel when you wake up in the morning.

You can also refer to wines by the grapes used. Red wines coming from Burgundy use pinot noir. So, you can refer to such a wine either as a Burgundy or a pinot noir. If the wine was made in California using the same type of grapes, however, it is a pinot noir only. Burgundy also turns out a lot of Chardonnay and Chablis, which can be referred to as "white Burgundies" (assuming they were in fact made in Burgundy).

The common wisdom is that white wines have more subtle flavors, so you shouldn't pair them with foods that have strong flavors lest they be overwhelmed; red wines would by the same logic, be paired with stronger flavored foods. The red wine that you get at Italian restaurants -- the type with the straw basket woven around the bottle -- is
Chianti, and is generally thought to go well with spicy Italian fare. However, in practice wine aficionados will tell you to drink whatever wine you like and not worry about pairing it up wrong.

As for letting a wine breathe -- it is mostly an myth. Exposing the wine to oxygen is a way of mellowing it a bit, and is only useful if you have opened a bottle prematurely (it was intended to age for several years and you opened it before then). If you let a properly aged bottle of wine breathe, it makes it taste worse.

Dessert wines are usually very sweet and sometimes thick. Examples would be port, sherry, or vermouth. I happen to like "ice wines," a type of dessert wine made from grapes that have been left on the vine through a freeze. When you say something is a dessert wine, it is supposed to be drunk as dessert, not with it. If you have food dessert with your dessert wine, it should be something like cheese or nuts.

White wines are served chilled, and red wines are served at room temperature. However, "room temperature" has been getting warmer and warmer over the centuries. The wine experts I've spoken with often suggest putting a red wine in the fridge for two hours, then letting it sit out on the counter for one hour before opening it.

My fencing teammates are huge fans of Woodchuck cider and vodka-based "girly-drinks" like Smirnov and Skyy Blue.

I, however, am a total oenophile. Dry reds are my favorite, and I don't like anything citrus-based. The price of the bottle doesn't always correlate with the quality of the wine. The best wine I've ever tasted was a $20 Australian shiraz with vanilla overtones and a pepper finish. The worst wine I've ever tasted was from a box.

(Random fact: cooking wine has added salt. So, if you ever want to make a dish which calls for cooking wine as an ingredient, just get a bottle of cheap chardonnay. It's SO much better. Or, if you want to get fancy and a little pricier, get a nicer bottle of wine and use the same for your cooking wine and your table wine. Draws the meal together nicely. Ok, the caterer in me will proceed to shut up now.)

Second, I'm not going to reexperience it until after I'm finished being pregnant.

Oh, boy. Where to start.

Okay. Burgundy is a region in France which produces both red and white wine. A white burgundy is made from Chardonnay--which is a type of grape. The red burgundy is usually made from a grape called Pinot Noir. So a frenchman might turn up his nose at California Chardonnay, which is heavily oaked (meaning that it spends a lot of time in new oak barrels. The newer the barrel the more pronounced the oaky quality), but the frenchman wouldn't necessarily turn his nose up at wines made with the Chardonnay grape.

Dessert wines are not usually roses, although they can be. A rose is better for a picnic and is one of the perfect summer wines. It gets a bad rap in the U.S. because of White Zinfandel (which is a sin and should never be made) but is perfectly respectable in Europe. A blush is not quite the same thing as a rose, but I'll have to ask my husband to explain the difference.

A desert wine would be a wine that contains residual sugar, such as a late harvest riesling, or a fortified wine like port (ports are red in color)

When you are wanting to know "what drink to stick in their hands" it's going to depend on the specific context and the person.

You should probably also pop the cork half an hour before dinner so that it can breathe, if it's a good wine.
Not necessarily. That could kill an older wine.

Popping the cork together is supposed to be a bit of a romantic thing.
When a bottle of champagne is uncorked the sound should be "no louder than a baby's fart" (honest-to-god wine term) or you will lose the effervesence that makes champagne interesting. Shooting it across the room is a no-no.

A winery would be able to give you tips on how to store, prepare and serve various wines.
Nope. They can give you information on how to make it and what their wine is best at. They are not necessarily foodies, so won't always know what to pair it with. Call a high-end wine store; they are in the business of knowing about lots of wines. They are reguarly asked to suggest pairings.

Or email me the scene and I'll insert the right wine lingo. (limited time offer)

Most beer seems to be $4-$6/six-pack, so you won't find so much class difference in beer.
Unless you live in an area with microbrews in which case it can go much higher than that.

Absinthe is distilled from wormwood, and is pretty toxic stuff.It contains wormwood, but is not distilled from it. It is not toxic, but was banned for being dangerous.

Sorry. At this point I'm feeling overwhelmed and don't know where to start. Why don't you email me your scene. Heck. You could even post in F&F if you want to use it as a learning experience for others.

Beer is a wide topic, you can get reviews of different beers at http://www.beeradvocate.com/
The saying of Europian beers are warm is not quite accurate. They are room temparture, which in most places is cool/cold by american standards. Dark beers are better warm than the american pale beers.
American pale beers came out around the time of (or just after) prohibition. Due to the downtime of beer, americans weren't up to the stouts of old, so brewers worked on making a 'soda' beer and the rest is history.

Alot can be learned about liquores by just reading the recipes and the names. Most of it is intuitive, because drunks can't be relied on to remember much.

If you have any questions, shoot me an email.

There are beer afficianados just as their are those for wine. Belgian beers tend to be rated as the best and are certainly near the top of my list.

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Popping the cork together is supposed to be a bit of a romantic thing.
When a bottle of champagne is uncorked the sound should be "no louder than a baby's fart" (honest-to-god wine term) or you will lose the effervesence that makes champagne interesting. Shooting it across the room is a no-no.

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I've also been told that doing things like shooting the cork across the room or off the ceiling is an insult to a good champagne.

This spring, I thought "since this stuff is so good (and inexpensive), the 'real' wine must be that much better." So I decided to branch out, and I took a wine-tasting class at the local community college (lesson learned the first night - when there are 10 wines on the taste list, do NOT drink all of everything that's put in front of you, especially if you're driving home). We concentrated on European wines - mostly German and French, and of that, mostly French.

We tasted some really expensive wines. And guess what - I'm still buying my same old red wine - there wasn't a single red over the eight-week period that I liked better than my trusty standby. Although I must say that I discovered that I like German wines - all of them: sweet, dry, yum. So that made the course worthwhile.

Anyway, I'm glad that MaryRobinette posted so I didn't have to get out my notes.

Lisa

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Most beer seems to be $4-$6/six-pack, so you won't find so much class difference in beer.
Unless you live in an area with microbrews in which case it can go much higher than that.

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I live in the Pacific Northwest - Land of the Microbrews. So I can say with authority that, yes it can go much higher than that.

Lisa

And speaking of microbreweries, I regularly bike right past the Red Hook facility. Stacks and stacks of empty kegs outside just waiting to be filled. Of course, they're not really a microbrew any more. And they did get bought out by Anheiser.

I'm sorry I didn't see this post earlier. I'm a bit of an expert on all sorts of alcoholic beverages. I've brewed many kinds of beer, wines, meads, and other various things with scary names like metheglin. No offense is meant to any of the previous posters, but just about everything said was incomplete. I think it may be too hard to just dump a bunch of alcohol facts on you, so feel free to email any specific questions you need answered to me.

At any rate, here's a few corrections. There are at least 100,000 distinct styles of beer, some are extremely expensive. Ales and lagers are both sub categories of beer. The difference is in the fermenting process, not color. Ales ferment quickly at room temperature and lagers ferment slowly at cooler temperatures. Here are some examples of the color spectrum:

Dark ales -
Stout (Guinness)
Wee Heavy
Porter

Dark Lagers -
Bock
Oktoberfest

Amber/red ales -
IPA or India Pale Ale
ESB or Extra Special Bitter

Amber/red lagers -
Standard Lager (Sam Adams and Yuengling)

Light ales -
Blonde ales
Lambics (belgian fruit beers)

Light lagers -
Pils or Pilsner (Budweiser, Miller, Coors, Rolling Rock, standard mass-produced american beer)
Hefeweisen (wheat beer)

Lagers probably have become the most popular beer in America because they are more stable than ales and have more consistent flavors. Prohibition killed the variety of American beers by driving all the small brewers out of business. When prohibition ended, scads of men went to fight in WWII and the newly re-opened breweries targetted the working women by selling very light tasting pilsners. Thus American beer was born.

"Warm" beers that the europeans drink are actually cellar temperature--about 55F--which is also a good lagering temperature and the natural temperature of caves.

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Wines are usually named for the grapes that their made from or the region where the grapes came from. Wines tend to get divided up by flavor (dry to sweet) and color (red to white). Sweet wines have unfermented sugars left over after fermentation. A red wine is made by leaving the grape skins in the fermentation vat to color the wine. Typically the extra tannin from the skins and the lack of excess sugars makes dry red wines more stable, so they can be aged for a number of years.

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I always find it interesting that "girly-drinks" tend to have more alcohol content than "Manly-Beer".

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"Girly drinks" are usually sweet and mask the flavor of the alcohol. Slug back two fingers of Kentucky Bourbon neat and you'll experience a manly beverage.

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As far as what to drink with what... there aren't any actual rules, but dry red wines have strong flavors that compliment steak, dry whites are subtle and good with fish. Dark beers and mulled (heated and spiced) wines are nice on cold winter days. Light beer and semi-sweet wine are refreshing on warm summer days.

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What else? The most expensive wines aren't necessarily the best. Inexpensive local and California wines have increased in quality over the last 50 years to the point that they rival expensive imports.

I know very little about alcoholic beverages of any kind.

I have heard that the alcoholic content of a serving of just about any kind of alcoholic beverage is roughly the same--as in a shot of whiskey has about as much alcohol as some regular amount of wine (8 ounces?) which has about as much alchohol as a can of beer (12 ounces?).

I have also heard that brandy is made from wine (distilled--meaning evaporated and recondensed?) and that vinegar is "spoiled wine" and that in order to make beer you need hops, though I don't know why.

Is hops the main ingredient of beer or is it the distinguishing ingredient--the thing that makes something a fruit beer instead of a fruit wine?

Or are wines only made from grapes and if you use other fruits it's called something else?

And so on and so forth. Even those of us who don't drink and don't ever intend to can learn some of this stuff so we use it correctly in stories. (A way of adding realism without having to add profanity? )

Just among beers, the alcohol content can vary. According to this site beer can be anywhere from 3.3% alcohol (Anchor Small) to 17.5% (Sam Adams Triple Bock). So you can see, you really have to look at the alcohol content to compare different drinks.

Hops give beer a bitter flavor. Different beers use different amounts of hops. That is the extent of my knowledge on that, though.

The main ingredient of beer would generally be barley, although there are also wheat beers (and others!).

I'm highly interested in most kinds of fermentation, but I know more about bread-making than brewing.

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in order to make beer you need hops, though I don't know why.

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1.5 oz liquor = 5 oz wine = 12 oz beer

That's assuming an 80 proof liquor (40% alcohol), 12-14% alcohol wine and 3-8% alcohol beer.

Brandy is indeed distilled wine. Distillation seperates alcohol from water in the wine. It's not a perfect seperation, so the resulting brandy has some of the water and flavors of the original wine. Repeated distillations can eventually seperate it all making a pure ethyl alcohol.

Alcohol is fermented from sugars anerobically. If oxygen is added to wine with active yeast, the wine can ferment again turning the alcohol into vinegar.

The main ingredient in beer is malted barley (or wheat)--that is, barley that has been allowed to germinate and then has been roasted to stop the germination. The malt sugars are what the yeast converts to alcohol.

Hops are a little green flower that grows on vines and look like a minature pine cones. They are used as a preservative in beer and add a bitter flavor to balance out the sweetness of the malt.

Technically wine is the term for fermented grapes, but it's used as a generic term for things that are fermented that don't have their own name. Dandelion wine, for example.

Rum is fermented sugar cane.
Whiskey, scotch, gin and vodka are all distilled from wheat alcohol (or mash or beer).
Gin is flavored with juniper berries.
Some Russian and Polish vodkas are made from potatoes.
Hard cider is fermented apples.
Apple jack is distilled cider. American frontiersmen used to make it by freezing cider until it was slushy and then removing the ice crystals.
Mead is fermented honey and water.
Fermented honey and grapes are called metheglin.
Honey and apples are cyser.

I don't know what else to add, but if you have more questions, ask.

I don't know why I'm jumping into this, I don't even like martinis. Just because I like gin and not vodka, I guess, and it's fun to tease vodka drinkers (my husband being one).

I kind of like the ones that are pretty much boozy Jolly Ranchers. But they're not martinis.