quotations about wine
I can't make wine simple. But I can make it fun and beautiful, instead of esoteric and intimidating. The minute you realize it's OK to stumble along like the rest of us, asking questions and paying attention to your own reactions, then you'll begin what I hope will be a lifelong love affair with wine.
JENNIFER ROSEN
introduction, The Cork Jester's Guide to Wine
None who has known the charity of wine,
Its pity, the cool logic of its spell
Will waver in his loyalty, or dwell
In any heaven where the grape lacks a shrine.
DONALD EVANS
"Farewell to Wine"
One of the things I've found in my preliminary research is that people are more negatively sensitive to the knowledge that a wine is cheap than they are positively sensitive to the knowledge that a wine is expensive. If I serve you a wine and tell you that it costs $4, you'll have a much more negative experience of the wine. It really biases you against the wine even more strongly than it biases you towards the wine when you know it costs $100.
ROBIN GOLDSTEIN
"Price is Right? Drinking Premium Wine is Image Therapy--If We Know It's Pricey", California Magazine, May 28, 2016
Do you dare to accuse wine of clouding the reason? Quote me more marvelous effects than those of wine. Look! when a man drinks, he is rich, everything he touches succeeds, he gains lawsuits, is happy and helps his friends. Come, bring hither quick a flagon of wine, that I may soak my brain and get an ingenious idea.
ARISTOPHANES
The Knights
I love to discover a $10 bottle of wine, a $15 bottle of wine, rather than the usual $70, $80 bottle of wine. Everybody likes to drink wine, so it's very important to have values.
PIERO SELVAGGIO
"The Once and Future Piero Selvaggio", Wine Spectator, April 30, 2017
Now let you and me buy wine today!
Why say we have not the price?
My horse spotted with five flowers,
My fur-coat worth a thousand pieces of gold,
These I will take out, and call my boy
To barter them for sweet wine.
And with you twain, let me forget
The sorrow of ten thousand ages!
LI BAI
"An Exhortation"
So wines at the time of the Bible were big, round, juicy, austere wines, red or amber in color. That austerity was often cut with water. It was basically required in the ancient world to dilute your wine with a little bit of water to round it out, and you were seen as a barbarian if you didn't do so.
KEITH BEAVERS
"What wine would Jesus drink?", Vinepair, April 11, 2017
We hear of the conversion of water into wine at the marriage in Cana as of a miracle. But this conversion is, through the goodness of God, made every day before our eyes. Behold the rain which descends from heaven upon our vineyards; there it enters the roots of the vines, to be changed into wine; a constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy. The miracle in question was only performed to hasten the operation, under circumstances of present necessity, which required it.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
letter to Abbé Morellet, 1779
We want to be the person who knows something about wine ... We are drinking for the experience and adventure of discovering something new.
MORGAN HARRIS
"Why millennials can't get enough wine", Fox News, April 6, 2017
Wine contains all four basic tastes. The sweet taste is provided by the alchohol and, where present, its sugars; sour taste comes from the free organic acids; the salt taste from the salts; the bitter taste from the wine's phenolic components, generally called tannins. In tasting wine, these four tastes are not perceived at the same time, they become apparent one after the other.
EMILE PEYNAUD
Knowing and Making Wine
Wine is a mixture of all things: a complex food; a social, religious, festive, and symbolic beverage; a materia medica; a lot of fun; a deity in liquid form "that will make the blind to see and the lame walk"; a fiery water; a delightful poison; a work of art; a work of nature; in sum, a living thing. A connoisseur will tell you it has charm, character, finesse, or breed, and he will call it honest, mature, disloyal, fat, or flabby. In fact, a great bottle of wine is thought to be so alive and individual that a true wine lover will consider it to be, in sincere humility, a better person than he is.
BOB MCKAY
"How not to let a shelf full of Chablis, Claret and Beaujolais intimidate you", Cincinnati Magazine, February 1977
I cook with wine, sometimes I even add it to the food.
W. C. FIELDS
attributed, Chicken Soup for the Wine Lover's Soul
Pure wine is fit for a royal table, while impure at any price proclaims an uneducated palate.
JAMES LEMOINE DENMAN
Pure Wine and How to Know It
Wine is a highly personal experience. You may like something your neighbor hates, just as with food. Your bitter is the next person's sweet.
CATHERINE FALLIS
Wine: Grape Goddess Guides to Good Living
The god of wine is a fascinating and frightful image of the cosmic interplay of life and death which began after the first catastrophe. Dionysus shows the world the two faces of a truth which makes one insane.... He brings death and resurrection all at once because he himself has tasted the intensity of life as well as death.
PHOTINA RECH
Wine and Bread
Wine and cheese are ageless companions, like aspirin and aches, or June and moon, or good people and noble ventures.
M. F. K. FISHER
introduction, Vin et Fromage
Wine lovers all speak of their First Time, a quasi-spiritual moment of awakening to wine's wonderment. After that, it's a life sentence. I've seen it happen to even the most confirmed beer sluggers.
JENNIFER ROSEN
introduction, The Cork Jester's Guide to Wine
One should always be drunk. That's all that matters.... But with what? With wine, poetry, or virtue as you choose. But get drunk.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
"Get Drunk"
To wash and rinse our souls of their age-old sorrows,
We drained a hundred jugs of wine.
LI BAI
"A Mountain Revelry"
All too often the wine is poured to nearly fill the glass ... this should be avoided, as it limits the headspace in the glass and consequently the bouquet, as well as eliminates swirling to increase the bouquet.
GORDON SHEPHERD
Neuroenology: How the Brain Creates the Taste of Wine