quotations about wine
Many people seek an easy formula for choosing better wines. I'm often asked if I can suggest a book, or a class, or a particular wine magazine. But trying to master the vast array of wine producers from almost all corners of the earth is a long, though fascinating, slog. I'm still trudging along that endless route myself. Fortunately, there is a simpler solution that does not require poring over tomes that daunt you with complexity, or pamphlets that mislead you by promising easy expertise. All you have to do is remember three words: Wine is food.
ERIC ASIMOV
"Want to Pick Better Bottles? Repeat After Me: Wine Is Food", New York Times, March 6, 2017
Choosing a wine is a "mood thing," which can vary depending upon the food with which it's accompanied, or by something as seemingly unexceptional as the weather. On a steamy day ... a pinot grigio; on a wintry day, a cabernet sauvignon.
DENISE MAROTTA LOPES
"Inspired Bites: Restaurant is both popular eatery and wine shop", Cecil Daily, February 6, 2016
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
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
A $300 bottle of wine is a more affordable status marker than a sports car or designer handbag.
W. BLAKE GRAY
"Price is Right? Drinking Premium Wine is Image Therapy--If We Know It's Pricey", California Magazine, May 28, 2016
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
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
Don't mix wine and women.
CESARE PAVESE
The Beach
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
Great Bacchus every trouble cures;
Then drink as long as life endures.
For, whilst we drain the rosy bowl,
'Tis all a sunshine of the soul!
ANACREON
Ode XXV, Odes
To wash and rinse our souls of their age-old sorrows,
We drained a hundred jugs of wine.
LI BAI
"A Mountain Revelry"
Next time your brain needs a challenge, skip the Sudoku and grab some wine. Enjoying a glass of wine makes the grey matter in our brains work harder than it would any other human activity -- like listening to music or solving a math problem.
LAUREN TOUSIGNANT
"Drinking wine is like burpees for your brain", New York Post, April 5, 2017
If Dracula would be happy there, so will your wine.
JENNIFER ROSEN
The Cork Jester's Guide to Wine
In Europe then we thought of wine as something as healthy and normal as food and also as a great giver of happiness and well-being and delight. Drinking wine was not a snobbism nor a sign of sophistication nor a cult; it was as natural as eating and to me as necessary.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
A Moveable Feast
Wine is one of the agreeable and essential ingredients of life.
JULIA CHILD
attributed, Wine: Grape Goddess
When full of wine we ask for water.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
Bronze is the mirror of the form; wine, of the heart.
AESCHYLUS
fragment
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 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