BEER, DESPITE a history as deep and rich as human memory, continues to suffer from something of an inferiority complex with respect to its longtime rival, wine. The latter apparently connotes sophistication and elegance, especially in restaurants with nice table linens, while the former is chugged from cans by blue-collar people and rowdy frat rats in the bleachers at football games. It is generally conceded that beer is a better match than wine with the spicier cuisines, but because beer hasn't become much more than an aperitif at (in particular) French-influenced places, the sense of inequality persists.

I pondered these questions, and many more, while sitting at a fancy dinner at a fancy (Frenchified) restaurant as part of a campaign by a major Midwestern brewer to, in the plainspoken brewmaster's words, "raise the image of beer." The dinner consisted of multiple courses, each matched to one of the brewer's beers and served in – ! – wine glasses. The beers were good, and they matched up decently with the elaborate food, yet the wine glasses troubled me as too transparent an attempt to hitch one's wagon to the wine train. I love wine glasses in their bulbous variety, but I love beer glasses too, which have their own sort of style. The choice, after all, is not between a heavy stein to be banged on the table for a refill and – for the brewmaster, the greatest sin in the realm of beer – swilling directly from the bottle.

Given the up-with-beer campaign's fixation on the Mediterranean food-and-wine cultures, mainly of France and Italy, you might suppose that the French and the Italians have nothing to do with beer. But this is deeply not so. Parisian sidewalk cafés are crowded with people drinking Kronenbourg from tall glasses, while the food of Roman trattorias and pizzerias is as beer-friendly as it is red-wine friendly. As for fussing pretentiously about wine: In both France and Italy you are likely to be served wine in a little Picardie tumbler if you order it at a café.

Do the overt class distinctions in those ancient cultures make irrelevant for them the waging of a proxy battle about class distinctions between beer and wine? And do we, by contrast, the putatively classless society, grow passionate about such a class struggle because it is one of the few ways for us to broach a truth we are all aware of – that ours is a deeply class-divided society – but cannot directly acknowledge, for fear of further shredding our already tattered national myths? A question to ponder over a glass of ...

Paul Reidinger paulr@sfbg.com