Making waves by Keith Stewart

Industrialisation of our taste buds has been a consistent theme of western history for 250 years, with bread, cheese and beer leading the way. But although supermarkets ooze sliced white death, cheeselets of every flavour and lame international lagers, there remain a few outposts of true flavour.

One of these is wine, where taste has been so closely bound to the land on which it is grown that the industrialists have had considerable difficulty bending it to their mass-production mentality. Beer, however, has suffered badly, and many of the great producers have been engulfed by the “international lager” tsunami initiated in the 19th century by the Austrians and Danes.

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