The Whole Package
Last night, I had the pleasure of being “the beer team” in a beer versus wine food matching debate/experience at House in Hamilton. I had the greater pleasure of winning that debate, despite an excellent (and extremely gracious) battle with “the wine team” – Dan Thursby from Hamilton Wine Company.
This was no mean feat, for several reasons. I’ll leave singing my own praises right out of this. I’m not the best public speaker in the world, so I can’t claim I swayed the audience with my shining wit. In fact, if anything, Dan was in fine form, and should perhaps have won on pure debating points alone. He does this sort of thing a lot though, whereas I’m usually limited to rowdy and unwelcome interjections from the sidelines, so I guess he had an edge there. He also claimed the room was stacked with beer friendly people. I felt the opposite was true! Several people I knew as avowed beer drinkers (and close friends) were voting honestly, occasionally putting wine as their preferred match – to my horror! Still, everyone is allowed to be wrong sometimes… I feel that 90% of people present (myself included) voted honestly and without bias. I genuinely believe that beer is a much better match with food than wine, and this proved that point for me because… well… I should have lost.
