WINE QUOTES
quotations about wine
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It needs only a good bottle of wine for a roast chicken to be transformed into a banquet.
GERALD ASHER, The Pleasures of Wine
The more I have learned about wine ... the more I have realized that it weaves in with human history from its very beginning as few, if any, other products do. Textiles, pottery, bread ... there are other objects of daily use that we can also trace back to the Stone Age. Yet wine alone is charged with sacramental meaning, with healing powers; indeed with a life of its own.
HUGH JOHNSON, Hugh Johnson's Story of Wine
Dandelion wine. The words were summer on the tongue. The wine was summer caught and stoppered.
RAY BRADBURY, Dandelion Wine
Great wines taste like they come from somewhere. Lesser wines taste interchangeable; they could come from anywhere. You can't fake somewhereness. You can't manufacture it ... but when you taste a wine that has it, you know.
MATT KRAMER, Making Sense of Wine
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
I may not here omit those two main plagues, and common dotages of human kind, wine and women, which have infatuated and besotted myriads of people. They go commonly together.
ROBERT BURTON, Anatomy of Melancholy
The pairing of food and wine is a complex and highly inexact science. It is fraught with out-moded rules and a propensity for generalizations.
SID GOLDSTEIN, The Wine Lover's Cookbook
Wine ... changing even as we taste it, delivers a message with meaning only in our response. If we are in the right key when we receive it, our eyes will shine and we shall radiate pleasure.
GERALD ASHER, The Pleasures of Wine
If a man rejoice not in his drinking, he is mad; for in drinking it's possible ... to fondle breasts, and to caress well tended locks, and there is dancing withal, and oblivion of woe.
Wine is valued by its price, not its flavour.
ANTHONY TROLLOPE, The Belton Estate
Wine gives a man nothing. It neither gives him knowledge nor wit; it only animates a man, and enables him to bring out what a dread of the company has repressed. It only puts in motion what had been locked up in frost.
SAMUEL JOHNSON, Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson
For when the wine is in, the wit is out.
THOMAS BECON, Catechism
Wine is a terrible foe, hard to wrestle with.
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 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 is older than history. Humans didn't invent wine. We discovered it.
PHILIP SELDON, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Wine
Thou wine art the friend of the friendless, though a foe to all.
Wine is a sensual pleasure. Its real value is when it splashes into the glass. It is not in the category of a Degas painting. The point is not for people to go to their cellar and stroke their bottles.
Wine hath drowned more men than the sea.
- 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!
Fumes of wine shorten the long road.
BAI JUYI, "After Passing the Examination"
- Who his cups can stoutly bear,
- In his cups despiseth fear,
- In his cups can nimbly dance,
- Him Lyæus will advance:
- Nectar of us mortals wine,
- The glad offspring of the vine,
- Screen'd with leaves, preserv'd within
- The plump grape's transparent skin,
- In the body all diseases,
- In the soul all grief appeases.
ANACREON, "Wine the Healer"
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
There's truth in wine, and there may be some in gin and muddy beer; but whether it's truth worth my knowing, is another question.
Unlike every other product that is now manufactured for the table, wine exists in as many varieties as there are people who produce it. Variations in technique, climate, grape, soil and culture ensure that wine is, to the ordinary drinker, the most unpredictable of drinks, and to the connoisseur the most intricately informative, responsing to its origins like a game of chess to its opening move.
ROGER SCRUTON, I Drink Therefore I Am
One of the most insidious myths in American wine culture is that a wine is good if you like it. Liking a wine has nothing to do with whether it is good. Liking a wine has to do with liking that wine, period. Wine requires two assessments: one subjective, the other objective. In this it is like literature. You may not like reading Shakespeare but agree that Shakespeare was a great writer nonetheless.
KAREN MACNEIL, The Wine Bible
Wine is life, death, and love.
THOM ELKJER, Adventures in Wine
If the wine is good, a bad match will not destroy dinner.
HARVEY STEIMAN, Wine Spectator's
Wine talks. Everyone knows that. Look around you. Ask the oracle at the street corner; the uninvited guest at the wedding feast; the holy fool. It talks. It ventriloquizes. It has a million voices. It unleashes the tongue, teasing out secrets you never meant to tell, secrets you never even knew. It shouts, rants, whispers, It speaks of great things, splendid plans, tragic loves and terrible betrayals. it screams with laughter. It chuckles softly to itself. It weeps in front of its own reflection. It opens up summers long past and memories best forgotten. Every bottle a whiff of other times, other places; every one, from the commonest Liebfraumilch to the imperious 1945 Veuve Clicquot, a humble miracle.... The transformation of base matter into the stuff of dreams. Layman's alchemy.
JOANNE HARRIS, Blackberry Wine
Wine is one of the agreeable and essential ingredients of life.
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