I thought this might be fun for this board. I posted this quote elsewhere but thought it was worth sharing and asking if others had great quotes they have come across in their literary pursuits.
Evelyn Waugh Brideshead Revisited published 1944 this quote is referring to a 1906 Montrachet and a 1904 Clos de Bère (sic):
I rejoiced in the Burgundy. How can I describe it? The Pathetic Fallacy resounds in all our praise of wine. For centuries every language has been strained to define its beauty, and has produced only wild conceits or the stock epithets of the trade. This Burgundy seemed to me, then, serene and triumphant, a reminder that the world was an older and better place than Rex knew, that mankind in its long passion had learned another wisdom than his. By chance I met this same wine again, lunching with my wine merchant in St. James’s Street in the first autumn of the war; it had softened and faded in the intervening years, but it still spoke in the pure authentic accent of its prime and, that day, as at Paillard’s with Rex Mottram years before, it whispered faintly, but in the same lapidary phrase, the same words of hope.
Love that quote Warren. Here’s one that’s a bit more modern and less lyrical from Jaqueline Friedrich’s A Wine and Food Guide to the Loire. I have to give thanks to Bob Semon for pointing me towards this. He hosted a group at his house outside DC a couple years ago and opened a lot of older Loire bottles. Towards the end, he pulled out Jaqueline’s book and read this passage.
“A young Breton (cabernet franc) sometimes tastes bell-peppery but is more often downright jammy and surging with fruit flavors - strawberry, raspberry, cassis, plum and cherry. A Breton ages beautifully too - though not like a Bordeaux, a Burgundy, or a Rhone. It passes through a secondary phase when it fairly reeks of musk and hung game. Then, instead of flowering, it seems to shed its baby fat, to be constantly refining itself, becoming translucent, a distillation of scents and nuances - of cranberry, cinnamon and creme de cassis; prune, licorice, and sandalwood; dried flowers, dried fruit, rip hay, mint, bark, truffles, and ash - all the while retaining its vigor and mouth-watering freshness. I often think of old Bretons as the embodiment of memory - not of a specific memory, but of memory itself. I have an image of an old handkerchief made of fine cloth softene after many years of being folded into purses, still carrying whiffs of many exquisite perfumes, mingled, muted, and fugitive.”
“As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
“I drank a bottle of wine for company. It was Chateau Margaux. It was pleasant to be drinking slowly and to be tasting the wine and to be drinking alone. A bottle of wine was good company.” —The Sun Also Rises, 1926
“When men drink, then they are rich and successful and win lawsuits and are happy and help their friends. Quickly, bring me a beaker of wine, so that I may wet my mind and say something clever.” - Aristophanes, The Knights, 424 B. C. E.
“Wine was created from the beginning to make men joyful, and not to make them drunk. Wine drunken with moderation is the joy of the soul and the heart”
http://amitiesjerome.com/2014/07/01/wine-and-music-rejoice-the-heart/
From Pirke Avot, (“Chapters of the Fathers” but commonly referred to as "Ethics of the Fathers) in the Mishna, probably written about the year 300 a reputedly representing five centuries of rabbinic ethical statements.
“He who learns from the young, what is he like? He is like one who eats unripe grapes and drinks wine fresh from his wine press. But he who learns from the aged, what is he like? He is like one who eats ripe grapes and drinks old wine.”
“Do not look at the flask but at what is in it; there may be a new flask that is full of old wine and an old flask that does not even have new wine in it.”
Great topic. Here is another one from Moveable Feast. I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately as I’ve been on a several month-long health-related wine-drinking hiatus (acid reflux).
“By then I knew that everything good and bad left an emptiness when it stopped. But if it was bad, the emptiness filled up by itself. If it was good you could only fill it by finding something better.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
This was cold comfort to me while traipsing around Beaune on a long-planned trip unable to drink wine. However, now I’m home, I’ve been using music to fill some of the space where wine used to be. And concluded that Hemingway is definitely right on this one. Happily though, also starting to heal and inch back into drinking small amounts of wine again.