Germany
Germany.
Munich International Airport.
"I was so embarrassed."
"About what?"
"You guzzling wine like water at every single meal!"
The moment they landed, Sora stuck out her lower lip in a full pout. The in-flight meals clearly hadn't sat well with her.
Weird.
It had tasted fine to him. Retort food, sure — nothing that could touch a fine restaurant — but perfectly respectable for airline fare.
"No, not the food. You, Senior."
"You were knocking it back too."
"I only drank because of you. I was forced."
Especially once he'd pulled off a proper mariage. Wine doubles the flavor of food, and Sora had eaten well. And now she was playing the sympathy card — the "I only ate because I had to" routine.
"I'll admit it was good, though."
"Right?"
"Do you have any idea how mortifying it was? Even the flight attendant was looking at us like we were pathetic."
"Ahem."
And that was no small feat. In-flight wine did come with a sommelier's basic guidelines, of course —
Sommelier. That's just a phone salesman with a cork.
A sommelier was, in a word, a salesman. Hired by wine houses to push their own labels. Expecting genuine expertise was a fool's errand. You think you know wine? Drink what you're given.
"It's a profession built on showing off."
"You have full-blown sommelier-phobia."
"You'll understand once your head gets a little bigger."
The wine market was enormous. Futures traded hot and heavy.
Plenty of sommeliers have made a killing on wine futures.
Drops of God. Even the protagonist's father in that manga had gotten rich off wine futures in his youth. The series had been out for well over a decade now, and the market had only grown larger since.
"Alcohol is a legitimate investment class. Know it well and it's one of the easier ways to make money."
"You'd be disgusting at it, Senior."
"Yeah."
Not that competence was universal. Sommeliers sold their own names to move volume. Companies pushed them to do exactly that — which was why the wine on the plane had been so half-assed. Without the right approach, it was mediocre at best.
"Can you tell what a wine is just by looking at it?"
"More or less."
"Just reading the names made my head hurt…"
"Doesn't matter. The wines that actually go up are always the same ones."
Famous châteaux. Brand wines. Classic vintages. That was the whole list. Truly rare bottles almost never appeared, and vintages were rarely spectacular or disastrous either way.
If pure taste were the metric, New World wines would take a lot of the top spots.
Those would climb the lists eventually. For now, Old World still dominated.
"New World, Old World — what a circus."
"What would a wine baby know?"
"I genuinely don't."
Customers wanted the same thing. Even if the quality dropped, people still craved the luxury label. Human nature.
Benz, BMW — no matter how shitty the finish, people still buy them.
Old World wine was luxury. French above all. Sommeliers stocked accordingly. But for people who actually wanted flavor —
"That could leave you pretty unsatisfied."
"That's what makes alcohol interesting."
"Oh."
A market formed. Services for the upper class. Services for people who dreamed of joining it.
All of it.
Alcohol was one of humanity's most honest desires. The flow of money showed itself more clearly there than almost anywhere else. That was why an investor needed to understand drink. Even Sora might catch a glimpse of capitalism through it.
"You could call alcohol a miniature of the stock market."
"I get it!"
"You? Of all people?"
"If you discover a delicious drink first, it gets expensive later."
At least the rear legs had sprouted. She'd understood a rat-dropping's worth of what he was saying.
If it rolled that easily, you wouldn't have gotten thoroughly wrecked in the first place.
And sommeliers wouldn't need to hustle so hard either. First, he would teach her what alcohol actually was. That was why he'd chosen Germany as their first stop. Beer was the most familiar spirit to ordinary people.
"Know why we flew into Munich?"
"Yeah, why not Berlin?"
"Because the best beer in the world is right around here."
"The best?"
They headed for the city next to Munich — Freising. Home to the world's greatest brewery.
Best is not in dispute.
Among beer maniacs, Weihenstephan left no room for argument. Even a casual drinker needed to try it at least once. They walked into the pub run directly by the brewery and ordered the house flagship on the spot.
Glug, glug, glug—
Hefeweizen. The cloudy, pale-brown liquid poured into the glass announced itself as a wheat beer without shame.
"The smell."
"What about it?"
"It's pouring banana."
"The taste is even denser."
Nothing in Korean beer — nothing even among the world beers at a convenience store — came close. It wasn't called the best for nothing.
Gulp. Gulp.
True to wheat beer, it went down silk-smooth, then filled the mouth with what real flavor meant.
Wheat beer is heavy.
A hundred and eighty degrees from the lagers on the market. It forced you to rethink beer from the ground up.
"Whoa…"
"Everything you've been drinking until now was piss."
"It really is good. So this is why they call it the best beer."
"Not that kind of best, though."
"?"
The world was wide. These days, new styles of beer were being born every day across the globe.
There are a lot of genuinely delicious beers out there.
Expensive ones, like wine, were common. Some that beat this one on pure taste certainly existed.
"Best as in oldest."
"Ah."
"Not the absolute best — but definitely the best of its kind."
"That actually has a ring to it."
Best (最古). The oldest brewery in the world. Nearly a thousand years of history.
And the best wheat beer, too.
On beer-rating sites it sat at a perfect hundred out of a hundred — the undisputed number one wheat beer. A beer you never regretted.
Crunch!
Wheat beer ran high in protein. It paired perfectly with the pretzel that came as the default German bar snack. Soft beer, hard pretzel. The coarse salt locked in with uncanny precision.
"It's just a simple snack with a drink, but it's insanely good."
"Right?"
"But what am I supposed to learn from this?"
You couldn't invest in a basic drink like this. But you could learn a country.
Germany had the Reinheitsgebot — the beer purity law.
Even people who never drank had heard the story once. Brew beer from malt, water, hops, and yeast alone!
"Then you shouldn't be allowed to use wheat either, right?"
"Wheat got a quiet pass."
"?"
Because the upper crust liked it that way. The nobility loved wheat beer so much they agreed to look the other way for certain hefeweizens.
Korea had the same thing.
Third Republic era. The Grain Management Act, passed on the pretext of food shortages. Often cited as the event that severed the lineage of traditional Korean liquor —
"A few drinks the president liked got exemptions."
"Ah."
"Baedari makgeolli and Geumjeongsanseong makgeolli, for example."
"So Germany's no different."
"No wonder Hitler— no. People are the same everywhere, that's all."
One drink could open a window onto an entire country. A place that had felt distant suddenly sat close.
That's the healthy function of alcohol.
Three things lived inside a drink: a nation's history, its food, and its people. You only had to drink to start seeing them.
"I told you to study a lot of things."
"Yes."
"Drinking can count as part of that study."
"So now I've got another excuse to drink."
Overseas investing. Stare only at corporate valuations and you'd get your nose broken. Without knowing a country, you couldn't know how its people thought.
And you need to drink if you want to get close to them.
None of it happened overnight. This European trip would widen his eye as an investor.
"Get drunk enough and you can even forget getting wrecked."
"Ugh!"
"Try this one too."
Of course, that wasn't the only reason. The most essential reason humans enjoyed alcohol was simply to get drunk.
Glug, glug, glug—
Weihenstephan Dunkel. A kind of dark beer made by roasting the barley a little further than the hefeweizen.
"If it's a dark beer, just say dark beer. What's 'a kind of dark beer'?"
"The word 'dark beer' doesn't actually exist."
"What."
A convenience label. The way not every Black person was African — an over-lumped category.
What people usually drink thinking it's dark beer — Kozel, Hite Stout — aren't dark beers at all.
They were lagers playing dress-up with color. Hand one of those to a beer maniac and call it dark beer and they'd look at you like you'd lost your mind. Do it to a business partner and the relationship would be over.
Gulp. Gulp.
That was how important it was. In Europe, alcohol was a sensitive culture that stood for a nation's roots.
"Whoa… this one's even denser."
"Yeah. It's fucking delicious."
"If someone lumped this in with Kozel, I'd be pissed too."
Kimchi and pao cai — same thing, right? The way that made a Korean angry, alcohol worked the same way.
At minimum, you can earn some goodwill.
Even people who didn't care about national pride warmed up to a foreigner who ate kimchi well. Natural phenomenon.
"You two really know how to drink, don't you?"
"It's good beer. We can't help drinking it well."
"Hahaha! Oriental friends who actually know their beer. No comparison to that American piss lager, right?"
No country on earth was free of national pride. The proprietor had been glancing their way and finally struck up a conversation.
The problem is the lunatics who weaponize it politically.
Speak the language. Eat the food. People felt charmed enough to slip you something extra.
"The basic lineup's solid, but since you've come all this way, you have to try this."
"Corbinian, is it? And on draft."
"You can only taste it here. Here!"
Weihenstephan's top-tier line. Body far thicker than the dunkel, with a chocolate-like sweetness as its signature.
I've never even had this on draft myself.
Being the brewery's own pub, they had everything. A touch lighter than the bottled version he knew, and far fresher.
Gulp. Gulp.
Sora seemed to like it on draft too. She polished off the complimentary Corbinian like a blink.
From the very first pub, the drinking had turned serious. After a couple of hours, Sora was swaying, thoroughly drunk.
"You okay? Can you walk?"
"I'm fiiine~!"
"Hotel? Or should we hit a sauna and wash up first?"
"Sauna!"
This was a trip. Investing mattered, sure — but resting and enjoying themselves was the ideal.
German culture really is open and good.
When it came to sex, at least.