Roll Out The Barrel: Mallorca’s Oktoberfests

Drunken tourism. Scandalised though the tourism industry in parts of Mallorca is by buckets of booze and bingeing, it is still more than happy to sanction the intake of industrial quantities of beer in the form of “bierfests”.

October is nearly upon us and so the Oktoberfests have already begun. And there will be not one, not two, but three: Peguera, Arenal and Palma. Drunken tourism is fine, so long as it has lager slopping over the veneer of tradition, albeit a German one.

Palma has joined the beer festival fray for the first time. It will be a gastronomic and cultural event, the town hall maintains, one that contributes to an ayuntamiento policy of leisure activities, 365 days a year, and so to a reduction of the impact of seasonality. Who are they kidding?

Shove the words “gastronomic” and “cultural” into a sentence and, bingo, you afford an event legitimacy in a peculiarly Mallorcan way, one which demands that events fall into on-message line with tourism of a gastronomic or cultural nature. Substitute the two words with drunken, and legitimacy is the last thing you get. But they amount to the same thing. The bierfest exists for one purpose and one purpose alone – to get absolutely slaughtered.

And what’s with this reduction of the impact of seasonality business? The season is still with us, isn’t it? Yes, but this outbreak of the rolling out of the Germanic beer barrel will mean more German tourists rolling in, thus ensuring the season does indeed extend beyond a September sell-by date.

Such optimism is based on a gargantuan German thirst for beer and hunger for schnitzel and wurst (which is what the gastronomy presumably refers to) and also on the fact that Mallorca, rather than either Bavaria or Baden-Württemberg, is the southerly most state of Germany. The Germans are as likely to gravitate to specific gravities in Mallorca as they are in Munich.

Well possibly. One great advantage of the Mallorca bierfests is that they go on beyond the Munich Oktoberfest. The Peguera fest, for example, doesn’t start until a few days after Munich finishes, so it is definitely an Oktoberfest, whereas Munich’s is a September-und-Oktoberfest. Palma’s will last for a good week longer than Munich and Arenal’s appears to go on forever. It’s pretty much a case of being able to drink up in Munich, hop on an Air Berlin beer airbus and shuttle down to Palma in time to get the next round in; the timing of Mallorca’s events allow for an entire month’s worth of unbroken bierfesting.

But are tourists specifically attracted by the bierfests? In Peguera last year, 60% or so of the reservations in its 1,800 square metre tent (and they love to announce how big these tents are; Palma’s is 1,125 square metres in case you’re interested, which you almost certainly aren’t) were from Spanish drinkers. And for the Spaniard, a bierfest is something of a drinking culture shock, presented as he or she would be by a vessel of a size more appropriate for putting flowers in rather than drinking from. Reporting of the Peguera event last year made a point of stressing that it wasn’t possible to drink in a measure less than half a litre; the reporting had the hint of a warning for the average Spaniard schooled on the junior measures of the caña.

But then culture shock for the Spanish there should be, as the Oktoberfest is a cultural experience; Palma town hall says so. It is unlikely, though, that typical Bavarian culture will take hold among the locals. Don’t expect the sale of dirndls to suddenly shoot up or for the local fiestas to dispense with pipers and whistlers and replace them with accordion and tuba players.

The Mallorca Oktoberfests aren’t really to do with culture. They owe far more to an acknowledgement of the importance of the German market and, in the case of both Peguera and Arenal, that there are parts of Mallorca which will be forever and über alles Deutschland. In Palma, there is a further aspect. It’s German culture that is costing the town hall barely a centimo.

One might be inclined to ask why it is that German culture can be exported and that of other countries, Britain for example, isn’t. One might ask, but then one might also ask – “what culture”? The Germans have at least retained some. Moreover, there may be a lot of drinking involved in a bierfest, but when it comes to the real thing of drunken tourism, there is only one nation that does it properly. No prizes for guessing.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

No Small Beer: Peguera’s Oktoberfest

The Oktoberfest is on. Not the one in Munich, the one that is really a Septemberfest, but the one in Peguera, little Germany on the island’s south side. 70,000 litres of German beer have crossed the Mediterranean in order to wet the whistle of Germans and others at this mini-me drinks marathon until 20 October. One Spanish report of the beer festival mentioned, almost with alarm, that the beer is not served in any quantity less than half a litre.

Beer for Germans is culture in a way that it is not for the British. It is woven into German society in a far more fundamental manner. Small towns have their breweries. Small towns and villages have their annual fairs – the “Kirchweihfesten” – at the heart of which are trestles to accommodate the beer drinkers. Beer is so much a part of German life that I once watched a television football discussion between Franz Beckenbauer and Paul Breitner. On the table in front of them were two glasses of “Weizen”, wheat beer. It’s hard to imagine Lineker and Shearer with a couple of pints of Tetley’s in the “Match Of The Day” studio.

The Peguera Oktoberfest is an example not just of the transporting of beer to Mallorca but also the bringing of German ways to the island. The relationship between Germany and Mallorca is of a different order to the one between Britain and the island. The Germans and the Brits form the two most important tourist markets (and also form the most populous of European resident groups), but there is a deeper bond between Germany and the island, and not just one reflected in what is almost certainly an urban myth – that some German businessmen once tried to buy Mallorca.

Not so long ago, it was said by a local politician that the British have Mallorca in their “genes”. It was an exaggeration. In Germany, on the other hand, Mallorca is a part of the national DNA. In Germany, you can easily buy Mallorca’s German newspapers or you can watch a Schlagermusik special, probably from Peguera, or Thomas Gottschalk’s “Wetten, dass…?” TV show being beamed from Palma. You can even find the Mallorca weather report on national telly.

So strong is the link that there is an imaginary lebensrauming land and sea bridge from Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg that reaches as far as Mallorca. It is no surprise that the Bierfest or Kirchweih should be re-created. But an Oktoberfest or a Gottschalk show might imply that the relationship is frivolous. Not so. The Germans take their Mallorca seriously.

As a people, they are curious and inquisitive as well as acquisitive of knowledge to a degree that the Brits are not. Sometimes it can be intrusive, such as when they are standing at the gate taking photos. But they arm themselves with every guide book imaginable and, being German, follow routes or recommendations to the letter. Every German seems to have actually read George Sand’s “Winter In Mallorca”, unlike everyone else who may have heard of it but can’t be bothered to read it. The Germans will try the language, because they’re interested in doing so and are not phased by cocking up, the product probably of the fact that they do foreign languages anyway, which is not the way with the Brits.

Beer, though, is a different matter. The Germans are as capable, if not more so than the British, of putting it away in industrial quantities. As the lovely Lisa and Johanna, two German students at the neighbours’ house this summer put it: “there are much very drunken persons in Arenal”. They didn’t approve. Beer is where Germany really kicks in and Mallorca fades into the background. The Germans take their Mallorca seriously, but not when it comes to beer. They take that just as seriously. For Germans, it is Weizen or helles or dunkel beers that matter, and not a Saint Mick. The Peguera Oktoberfest is a manifestation of Germans’ obsessiveness with the Reinheitsgebot purity order of their beer. And they’re right to be obsessive; German beer is the best in the world. Which is why cutting along to Peguera isn’t such a bad idea before it all runs out. Prost!

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.