Instructive wine quotes
THE PERILS OF BLIND TASTINGS:
“I remember three constant frequenters of the docks...who used to express themselves in their peculiar oracular way, so authoritatively, that I resolved to put their judgment to the test.....I used to tell the cooper to draw two glasses from the same pipe, and to hand them as if they were from different numbers. I may say that the trick upon them was invariably successful, for they were sure after tasting, and retasting, and much profound thought, to pronounce the verdict that, although similar, one possessed rather more of this, or that, than the other. I kept my own counsel, but was convinced...that in wine-tasting and wine-talk there is an enormous amount of humbug.”
---T.G. Shaw, Wine, The Vine and the Cellar,
Burgundy at its best overtops claret at its best...You will only drink four or five bottles of truly first-class Burgundy in your whole life (and you will be lucky if you find so many....Only 3 have rung the bell with me....) But you can drink claret of the highest class several times in a year-- claret that should be drunk kneeling with every sip consecrated as a libation to Heaven. ....[My third of the three great Burgundies I have had] was nearly twenty years ago. ....I took one sip; I closed my eyes, and every beautiful thing that I had ever known crowded into my memory....The song of armies sweeping into battle,...the glint of sunshine after rain on the leaves of the forest...the voices of children singing hymns, all these and a hundred other things seemed to be blended into one magnificence.
--Maurice Healy, “Stay Me with Flagons”
It fills one’s mouth with a gushing freshness--then goes down cool and feverless--then you do not feel it quarrelling with your liver--no, it is rather a peacemaker, and it lies as quiet as it did in the grape; then it is as fragrant as the queen bee, and the more ethereal part of it mounts into the brain...like Aladdin about his enchanted palace so gently that you do not feel his step.
---John Keats, 1819, on claret
Wine opens the heart. It warms the shy poet hidden in the cage of of the ribs. It melts the wax in the ears that music may be heard. It takes the terror from the tongue that truth may be said, or what rhymes marvellously with truth. The soft warm sting on the cheekbones that a ripe Burgundy gives is only the thin outward pervasion of a fine heat within, when the cruel secret smoulder of the wit leaps into clear flame, flame that consumes the sorry rubbish of precaution and cajolery.
CHRISTOPHER MORLEY
Old wine has the charm and savour of a remembrance. Like the latter, if comes to us form the past, decanted from its mires and bonds--clear, brilliant, aureoled with joy and fragrance. Like remembrance, also, it knows how to unlock for us the springs of a dream.
PIERRE POUPON