quotations about wine
Wine is not just an object of pleasure, but an object of knowledge; and the pleasure depends on the knowledge.
ROGER SCRUTON
I Drink Therefore I Am
When full of wine we ask for water.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
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
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
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"
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
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
Drinking wine is easy: tilt glass and swallow. Really tasting wine is more of a challenge. You need the proper tools and environment, the ability to concentrate, a good memory and a vivid imagination.
MARVIN R. SHANKEN
Wine Spectator's Pocket Guide to Wine
To wash and rinse our souls of their age-old sorrows,
We drained a hundred jugs of wine.
LI BAI
"A Mountain Revelry"
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
Bronze is the mirror of the form; wine, of the heart.
AESCHYLUS
fragment
Wine is perhaps the closest thing the planet has to an elixir of life.
THOM ELKJER
Adventures in Wine
You may happen on a good bottle, but chances are you will not. For that, you need a store run by passionate devotees who do much of the advance work for you. A good wine shop or online merchant with a point of view, like a great butcher or baker, will have performed a rigorous selection process before making its wares available to consumers. Knowing that you are in a good wine shop can sharpen your decision-making down to issues of taste and occasion rather than quality.
ERIC ASIMOV
"Want to Pick Better Bottles? Repeat After Me: Wine Is Food", New York Times, March 6, 2017
Wine molecules don't actually have any flavor, and it's our brains that create the sensation that we perceive as taste. The process is similar to how our brains see color. Wine molecules stimulate thousands of our mouth's taste and odor receptors, which create both a sensory and emotional reaction in our brain. All these signals spark different cognitive areas -- including memory, pattern recognition and pleasure -- which work together to deliver the wine's "taste."
LAUREN TOUSIGNANT
"Drinking wine is like burpees for your brain", New York Post, April 5, 2017
Wine is most comfortable in the temperature range that people are -- make that Eskimo-type people.
WILLIE GLUCKSTERN
The Wine Avenger
Don't mix wine and women.
CESARE PAVESE
The Beach
If Dracula would be happy there, so will your wine.
JENNIFER ROSEN
The Cork Jester's Guide to Wine
The taste is not in the wine; the taste is created by the brain of the wine taster.
GORDON SHEPHERD
Neuroenology: How the Brain Creates the Taste of Wine
Wine is literally the soil and its biodiversity, rain, wind, temperature and all that goes on during the seasons. A good winemaker merely guides the process and lets Mother Nature take her course.
MICHAEL ROBINSON
"Ensuring wine is climate in a bottle", The Royal Gazette, March 17, 2017
Wine is older than history. Humans didn't invent wine. We discovered it.
PHILIP SELDON
The Complete Idiot's Guide to Wine