Bartender, There’s a Beer in My Wine

By Lauren Collins

Remember the Cronut? The Frankensteinian pastry—half croissant, half doughnut—was so popular upon its introduction, in 2013, that New Yorkers waited in line for hours to taste one. Or else they hired Cronut scalpers to wait for them, paying up to a hundred dollars for a single hunk of glazed dough. The Cronut’s creator, Dominique Ansel, trademarked the name, which led to the appearance of imitation treats: fauxnuts, cronies, zonuts, frissants. Not all hybrid foods are created equal, but as brunch, Spam, turducken, pluots, Craisins, and zoodles demonstrate, you’re halfway there with a catchy name.

Recently, in Paris, posters appeared all over town advertising an unfamiliar beverage: vière. “Du jamais bu,” one poster punned—“Never before drunk.” It came in a seven-hundred-and-fifty-millilitre glass bottle, just like a Chablis or a Marsannay. The bottle had a metal cap, the kind you might pry off the top of a Heineken. “It’s not a typo,” Gallia, the drink’s manufacturer explained, on its Web site, of “vière,” adding that “we wanted to switch things up by combining two malts that we love.” Vin (wine) + bière (beer) = vière. Where did it rank on the scale of appletinis to Frappuccinos?

“The idea was to be able to present some of what’s great about France—the French terroir,” Rémy Maurin, Gallia’s first master brewer, said the other day at the brand’s headquarters, in Pantin, just north of Paris. “But we’re a brewery, so we make beer, right?” He was standing at a vière-laden table with Amelia Franklin, Gallia’s head of marketing for local products. (The brand was founded in Paris in 1890, revived in 2010, and bought by Heineken in 2021.) Nearby, a pair of employees, in bikinis, were soaking in a pair of hundred-and-sixty-gallon runoff vats that they had repurposed as a pair of hot tubs. (The water was actually cool, and compressed air made it bubble from time to time.)

Making vière, Maurin and Franklin explained, involves both grapes and grains. Last year, production began with some thirty tons of the former, delivered to Pantin by the truckload (eleven, by a rough count), immediately after the harvest, from organic growers in the Loire Valley, Ardèche, and Alsace. “We wanted to give a French identity to brewing,” Maurin said, adding, “It’s impossible for an American brewery to get Pinot Noir from the actual region to make a beer with.” The grapes are de-stemmed, pressed, and left to macerate in a metal tank. When Maurin feels that the time is right, he adds soured beer wort, derived from barley and wheat. “You ferment the two together, and you get the best of both worlds,” Maurin said. “The texture of beer with the flavor of wine.”

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Beer-wine hybrids, sometimes called oenobeers or grape ales, aren’t a brand-new idea, exactly. “I mean, realistically, vière is inspired by a lot, right?” Franklin said. Belgian brewers started experimenting with fruit-enhanced lambics centuries ago. In America, oenobeers have caught on at craft breweries such as Dogfish Head, which makes a “vino-esque ale” called Mixed Media. If American oenobeers tend to lean toward the stalk—by law, forty-nine per cent is the highest grape content a drink can have and still call itself a beer—vière is closer to the vine. Maurin started his career in his apartment kitchen, using a coffee grinder and five-litre Evian bottles. He appreciates the spontaneity that grapes bring to the relatively predictable process of making beer. “Brewers are control freaks,” he said. “But natural winemakers, they trust that nature will balance things itself.” He opened a ruby-toned bottle of vière called Franc Jeu, swirled, and took a sip: “This is kind of our version of an Italian Lambrusco.”

Vière is served in a wineglass, not a pint glass. Maurin likes to drink it very cold: reds in the fridge, whites and rosés in the freezer for half an hour before opening. “Since you have a little bit of sweetness, it’s even more drinkable,” he said. France, obviously, is a nation of wine drinkers, but beer is rapidly gaining favor, especially among young people, thirty-two per cent of whom cited it in a recent survey as their preferred alcoholic beverage, besting wine by five points. Vière, then, might be thought of as a gateway beer, as relaxed as a Kronenbourg, but more elegant; as complex as a Pic Saint Loup, but less alcoholic. “I used to work in a beer bar, and often you have people coming in with a group, and they say, ‘I don’t like beer,’ ” Maurin recalled. “This product is exactly the type of product that you can get them to drink.” Surprisingly, he’d heard only a few grumbles from the vinicultural Old Guard. “We actually know that not everyone is going to like it, and that’s O.K.,” he said.

Back to Cronuts, for a minute. Vière, it turns out, was originally called “vin sauvage” (“wild wine”). One day, Maurin invited the consultant Julien Pham for a tasting. He came up with a novel name for the product, which Time Out, in Paris, eventually reprised with a headline that read “Vive la vière! ” “It was actually a joke at the beginning,” Maurin recalled. “But, after the article, people came here and started asking us for it, and then it became, like, ‘No, we have to call it this.’ It’s really a word that explains completely what’s inside the glass.” ♦