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Quick Quiz: Name two beverages, one grape- and the other grain-based, that bear a surprising similarity to one another. No, it’s not wine and barleywine, and neither is it port and porter, since I’m talking about taste rather than nomenclature.

It’s also not Thunderbird and Old English 800, although I will admit that a case could probably be made for the conjoining of those two disasters.

Give up? It’s Champagne and traditional gueuze lambic, that most storied and gloried of all wines and the single style of beer that best speaks to its humble origins. Not exactly the most probable of pairings, I will admit, but one which makes all sorts of sense when you look at it closely.

(I should note here that the beer I am referring to is the classic gueuze, the one made up of 100 percent spontaneously fermented wheat beer and the sort that the Belgian lambic producers group, HORAL, has managed to protect with the designation oude, meaning old. These are beers which undergo a fermentation by wild, air-borne yeasts and other bacteria, and are aged in wooden barrels to tremendous complexity. They are also bottled unsweetened, unlike certain pseudo-gueuzes, such as the mainstream labels from St. Louis or Belle-Vue, which not only bear no relation to Champagne, but have next to nothing to do with real lambic.)

Take the way they’re made, for example. In the classic méthode champenoise, allegedly invented by the 17th century monk, Dom Pérignon, the blended and once-fermented juices of three grapes, Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier, are bottled with a small dosage of yeast and sugar to stimulate a secondary fermentation within the bottle. In the preparation of a traditional gueuze, 1- to 3-year-old lambics are blended and bottled with, yes, a bit of sugar to stimulate the bottle-fermentation. (No extra yeast is needed because the component lambics are left unfiltered.)

Following the bottling, both beer and wine will be cellared until the fermentation in the bottle is complete and the liquids deemed ready for consumption. The difference is that Champagne goes through an additional pair of processes called remuage and dégorgement, in which the yeast is coaxed into the neck of the bottle, frozen and removed. You could do this with lambic, too, but it would add untold cost to the production of a beer which, unfortunately, has only a very small audience to begin with.

Happily, the similarities between Champagne and gueuze lambic continue beyond the ways in which they are made. Even in appearance, the fine mousse of a gueuze will resemble that of a Champagne, and the color shouldn’t be that far off, either.

In taste, where it really counts, comparisons still persist. Although often characterized as simply sour — I prefer the more agreeable and, I think, apt descriptive of "tart," although I’ll admit that this could be construed as being more than a little pedantic — the defining flavor trait of a traditional lambic is actually its dryness, as it is in classic Champagnes. Moreover, I have sampled more than one or two gueuzes for which I could employ that favorite adjective of Champagne snobs, "biscuity," and have likewise encountered in lambics a fruitiness more than a little reminiscent of that of certain Champagnes.

Of course, having asserted all of this, there is little chance that anyone is going to blind taste a lambic and mistake it for Champagne, or vice versa. But as I have said many times in the past, I do believe that lambic bears more resemblance to Champagne than it does to, say, a pilsner or pale ale, just as the taste of Champagne has more in common with a good gueuze lambic than it does with a modern chardonnay or pinot noir.

As an ardent aficionado of both lambic and Champagne, although, for budgetary reasons, a greater consumer of the former than the latter, I discovered this unconventional partnership quite by chance several years ago. While making the final preparations for a dinner party at my home, I decided to salve my kitchen-induced thirst with a small bottle of Cantillon Gueuze, a beer that can be surprisingly quenching under the right circumstances. An hour or so later, I opened a bottle of Veuve Clicquot Champagne as my guests began arriving and was surprised to find my taste memory returning to the lambic.

Months later, at a beer dinner I was hosting at Philadelphia’s Monk’s Café, I decided to offer the guests twin aperitifs of that same Champagne and Cantillon Vigneron, a lambic refermented with Italian muscat grapes. As I began explaining the relationship between the two, the looks I received from the assembled audience could at best be described as quizzical, at worst incredulous. (Okay, at real worst they were "Have you lost your freaking mind?!") But the more people sipped back and forth between the two flutes in front of them, the more eyes opened, heads nodded and figurative light bulbs illuminated. In short, when they tasted it, they got it.

And really, when you get right down to it, that’s the way it is in general where traditional lambic is concerned. Through the years, I’ve found that the best way to prepare someone for their first sample of the stuff is to advise them to first forget everything they know about beer and consider the beverage they are about to taste as something completely removed from anything they’ve ever experienced. Except, of course, Champagne, but I generally wait until the second or third sip before I spring that on them.

Note: If traveling in Belgium for the Zythos Beer Festival this March, don’t miss the Nacht van Grote Dorst, or Night of Great Thirst, which is possibly the world’s greatest festival of lambics. It takes place in the center of Eizeringen on Friday, March 3, beginning at 7:00 pm. And bring along a bottle of Veuve, just for fun.