Wine Quotes
By Last Name:A B C D E F G H I J K M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z Unknown
A
“I made a mental note to watch which bottle became empty soonest, sometimes a more telling evaluation system than any other."
~ Gerald Asher, "On Wine"
B
"Wine is at the head of all medicines; where wine is lacking, drugs are necessary."
~ Babylonian Talmud: Baba Bathra
"Within the bottle’s depths, the wine’s soul sang one night."
~ Charles Baudelaire, French poet and critic
"My dear girl, there are some things that are just not done, such as drinking Dom Perignon ‘53 above the temperature of 38° Fahrenheit."
~ James Bond in Ian Fleming’s Goldfinger
"Drinking good wine with good food in good company is one of life's most civilized pleasures."
~ Michael Broadbent
"Wine cheers the sad, revives the old, inspires the young, makes weariness forget his toil." ~ Lord Byron
C
"Compromises are for relationships, not wine."
~ Sir Robert Scott Caywood
"Hardly did it appear, than from my mouth it passed into my heart."
~ Abbe de Challieu after his first taste of Champagne
"And water is on the Bishop's board and the Higher Thinker's shrine, But I don't care where the water goes if it doesn't get into the wine."
~ G.K. Chesterton
"And Noah, he often said to his wife when he sat down to dine, 'I don't care where the water goes if it doesn't get into the wine.'"
~ G.K. Chesterton
"Wine is a living liquid containing no preservatives. Its life cycle comprises youth, maturity, old age, and death. When not treated with reasonable respect it will sicken and die."
~ Julia Child
"Gentlemen, in the little moment that remains to us between the crisis and the catastrophe, we may as well drink a glass of Champagne."
~ Paul Claudel
“I can certainly see you know your wine. Most of the guests who stay here wouldn’t know the difference between Bordeaux and Claret.”
~ John Cleese as Basil Fawlty in Fawlty Towers
"Today's winemakers still worry about quality."
~ Francis Ford Coppola, on the difference between making wine and making films
D
"Wine. The intellectual part of the meal."
~ Alexandre Dumas
E
"A man will be eloquent if you give him good wine."
~Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Give me wine to wash me clean of the weather-stains of care."
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
F
"If food is the body of good living, wine is its soul."
~ Clifton Fadiman
"To take wine into your mouth is to savor a droplet of the river of human history."
~ Clifton Fadiman
"A bottle of wine begs to be shared; I have never met a miserly wine lover."
~ Clifton Fadiman
"[Wine is] poetry in a bottle."
~ Clifton Fadiman
"What contemptible scoundrel stole the cork from my lunch"
~ W. C. Fields
"During one of my treks through Afghanistan, we lost our corkscrew. We were compelled to live on food and water for several days."
~ W.C.Fields
"I cook with wine; sometimes I even add it to the food."
~ W. C. Fields
"Penicillin cures, but wine makes people happy."
~ Sir Alexander Fleming
"Wine is constant proof that God loves us and loves to see us happy."
~ Benjamin Franklin
"Wine makes daily living easier, less hurried, with fewer tensions and more tolerance."
~ Benjamin Franklin
G
"Wine rejoices the heart of man and joy is the mother of all virtues"
~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1771
H
"Wine is the most civilized thing in the world."
~ Ernest Hemingway
"Wine … offers a greater range for enjoyment and appreciation than possibly any other purely sensory thing which may be purchased."
~ Ernest Hemingway
"In Europe we thought of wine as something as healthy and normal as food and also 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 can of their wits the wise beguile, Make the sage frolic, and the serious smile."
~ Homer, "The Odyssey" "Wine brings to light the hidden secrets of the soul, gives being to our hopes, bids the coward flight, drives dull care away, and teaches new means for the accomplishment of our wishes."
~ Horace
I
J
"Good wine is a necessity of life for me."
~ Thomas Jefferson
"No nation is drunken where wine is cheap, and none sober where the dearness of wine substitutes ardent spirits as the common beverage."
~ Thomas Jefferson
"I think it is a great error to consider a heavy tax on wines as a tax on luxury. On the contrary, it is a tax on the health of our citizens."
~ Thomas Jefferson
"I rejoice as a moralist at the prospect of a reduction of the duties on wine by our national legislature.... Its extended use will carry health and comfort to a much enlarged circle."
~ Thomas Jefferson
"Wine ... the true old man's milk and restorative cordial."
~ Thomas Jefferson
“We could in the United States make as great a variety of wines as are made in Europe, not exactly of the same kinds, but doubtless as good.”
~ Thomas Jefferson
"He who aspires to be a serious wine drinker must drink claret."
~ Samuel Johnson
K
"My only regret in life is that I did not drink more Champagne."
~ John Maynard Keynes
"I wonder what the vintners buy one half so precious as the stuff they sell."
~ Omar Khayyam
L
"…then the streams would run with wine instead of water and the whole forest would give itself up to jollification for weeks on end."
~ C. S. Lewis in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
"When it comes to wine, I tell people to throw away the vintage charts and invest in a corkscrew. The best way to learn about wine is the drinking."
~ Alexis Lichine
"Beer is made by men, wine by God."
~ Martin Luther
M
"What though youth gave love and roses, age still leaves us friends and wine."
~ Thomas Moore
"So life’s year begins and closes;
Days though shortening still can shine;
What though youth gave love and roses;
Age still leaves us friends and wine."
~ Thomas Moore
N
"In victory, you deserve champagne, in defeat, you need it."
~ Napoleon
"Nothing makes the future look so rosy as to contemplate it through a glass of Chambertin."
~ Napoleon
O
"When there is plenty of wine, sorrow and worry take wing."
~ Ovid, "The Art of Love"
P
"Wine is the most healthful and most hygienic of beverages."
~ Louis Pasteur
"There are two reasons for drinking wine...when you are thirsty, to cure it; the other, when you are not thirsty, to prevent it... prevention is better than cure."
~ Thomas Love Peacock
"Come quickly! I am tasting stars!"
~ Dom Perignon upon tasting Champagne for the first time
"Wine is life."
~ Petronius, Roman writer
"A man not old, but mellow, like good wine."
~ Stephen Phillips
"In vino veritas."
In wine there is truth.
~ Pliny the Elder
"Men are like wine - some turn to vinegar, but the best improve with age."
~ Pope John XXIII
"And wine can of their wits the wise beguile, make the sage frolic, and the serious smile."
~ Alexander Pope
"It takes a lot of beer to make good wine."
~ Lou Preston, Preston Vineyards
Q
R
"If God forbade drinking, would He have made wine so good?"
~ Cardinal Richeleu
“Wine had such ill effects on Noah’s health that it was all he could do to live 950 years. Show me a total abstainer that ever lived that long.”
~ Will Rogers
S
"When [wines] were good they pleased my sense, cheered my spirits, improved my moral and intellectual powers, besides enabling me to confer the same benefits on other people."
~ George Saintsbury, "Notes on a Cellar Book" "The wine cup is the little silver well, where truth, if truth there be, doth dwell."
~ William Shakespeare
"I'm only a beer teetotaler, not a champagne teetotaler. I don't like beer."
~ George Bernard Shaw
"Wine makes every meal an occasion, every table more elegant, every day more civilized."
~ André Simon
"Pour out the wine without restraint or stay. Pour not by cups, but by the bellyful. Pour out to all that wull."
~ Edmund Spencer
"A bottle of good wine, like a good act, shines ever in the retrospect."
~ Robert Louis Stevenson
T
U
V
"I serve your Beaune to my friends, but your Volnay I keep for myself."
~ Voltaire
W
"Port is not for the very young, the vain and the active. It is the comfort of age and the companion of the scholar and the philosopher."
~ Evelyn Waugh
"The First Duty of wine is to be Red...the second is to be a Burgundy"
~ Harry Waugh
"Oh, actually all champagne is French, it's named after the region. Otherwise it's sparkling white wine. Americans of course don't recognize the convention so it becomes that thing of calling all of their sparkling white champagne, even though by definition they're not."
~ Wayne's World (Benjamin Kane)
"We want the finest wines available to humanity, we want them here, and we want them now!"
~ Withnail in Withnail and I (1987)
"I made wine out of raisins so I wouldn't have to wait for it to age."
~ Steven Wright
X
Y
Z
Unknown
"A man fallen on hard times sold his art collection but kept his wine cellar. When asked why he did not sell his wine, he said, 'A man can live without art, but not without culture.'"
~ Anonymous
"Drink wine, and you will sleep well. Sleep well, and you will not sin. Avoid sin, and you will be saved. Ergo, drink wine and be saved."
~ Medieval German saying.
"There can be no bargain without wine."
~ Latin saying
An anonymously penned 17th century haiku has this to say about sake:
| Sake nakuta
Nan no onore ga Sakura kana |
Without flowing wine
What good to me are lovely Cherry trees in bloom? |
"It sloweth age, it strengtheneth youth, it helpeth digestion, it abandoneth melancholie, it relisheth the heart, it lighteneth the mind, it quickenth the spirits, it keepeth and preserveth the head from whirling, the eyes from dazzling, the tongue from lisping, the mouth from snaffling, the teeth from chattering and the throat from rattling; it keepeth the stomach from wambling, the heart from swelling, the hands from shivering, the sinews from shrinking, the veins from crumbling, the bones from aching, and the marrow from soaking."
~ copied from a 16th Century manuscript
A man, fallen on hard times, sold his art collection but kept his wine cellar. When asked why he did not sell his wine, he said, “A man can live without art, but not without culture.”
~ Anonymous
Before leaving home to serve a one year jail sentence, a “white collar” criminal was quoted as saying, “I’m not worried about the reds; they’ll keep OK. But I am worried about the whites.”
~ Anonymous.