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FOOD QUOTES SECTION

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Wine Quotes

“Chardonnay is a red wine masquerading as a white, and Pinot Noir is a white wine masquerading as a red.”
André Tchelistcheff, winemaker (1901-1994)

“Wine is meant to be with food - that's the point of it.”
Julia Child (1912-2004)
 

“Great people talk about ideas, average people talk about things, and small people talk about wine.”
Fran Lebowitz, journalist
 

"What I like to drink most is wine that belongs to others."
Diogenes , 320 BC, Greek philosopher
 

“Take heed of the Vinegar of sweet Wine, and the Anger of Good-nature.”
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) ‘Poor Richard's Almanac’
 

“O thou invisible spirit of wine, if thou has no name to be known by, let us call thee devil....O God, that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains! that we should, with joy, pleasance revel and applause, transform ourselves into beasts!”
William Shakespeare (1564-1616) 'Othello'
 

"A meal without wine is like a day without sunshine."
Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, ‘The Physiology of Taste’ (1825)

“Bless the products of the bovines and the vines!”
William Cole, 'What a Friend We Have in Cheeses!'
 

"To claim that wines should not be changed is a heresy; the palate becomes saturated and after the third glass the best of wines arouses nothing but an obscure sensation."
Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755-1826)
‘The Physiology of Taste’

“Wine makes daily living easier, less hurried, with fewer tensions and more tolerance.”
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)

“When Wine enters, out goes the Truth.”
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) ‘Poor Richard's Almanac’
 

"Wine gives great pleasure, and every pleasure is of itself a good."
Samuel Johnson (1778) Boswell's ‘Life of Johnson’
 

Why beer is better than wine: "....human feet are conspicuously absent from beer making."
Steve Mirsky, ‘Scientific American’ (May, 2007)
 

“Never spare the Parson's wine, nor the Baker's pudding.”
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)’ Poor Richard's Almanac’
 

"Wine makes a symphony of a good meal."
Fernande Garvin, ‘The Art of French Cooking’
 

"Wine is sure proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy."
Benjamin Franklin
 

"Between each wine and each dish one should drink a mouthful of pure fresh water, preferably not (or only slightly) aerated."
Paul Ramain (1895-1966), French doctor.
 

"the road to great wine is littered with beer bottles"
Unknown
 

“Wine is one of the most civilized things in the world and one of the most natural things of the world that has been brought to the greatest perfection, and it offers a greater range for enjoyment and appreciation than, possibly, any other purely sensory thing.”
Ernest Hemingway, 'Death in the Afternoon'
 

"An aged Burgundy runs with a beardless Port. I cherish the fancy that Port speaks sentences of wisdom, Burgundy sings the inspired Ode."
Ambrose Bierce, American writer (1842-1914)
 

"The vine bears three kinds of grapes: the first of pleasure, the second of intoxication, the third of disgust."
Anacharsis, Scythian philosopher (6th century B.C.)
 

"Wine makes daily living easier, less hurried, with fewer tensions and more tolerance."
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
 

"Before Noah, men having only water to drink, could not find the truth. Accordingly...they became abominably wicked, and they were justly exterminated by the water they loved to drink. This good man, Noah, having seen that all his contemporaries had perished by this unpleasant drink, took a dislike to it; and God, to relieve his dryness, created the vine and revealed to him the art of making le vin. By the aid of this liquid he unveiled more and more truth."
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
 

"Take counsel in wine, but resolve afterwards in water."
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
 

"For a gourmet wine is not a drink but a condiment, provided that your host has chosen correctly."
Edouard De Pomaine, French author
 

"The dipsomaniac and the abstainer are not only both mistaken, but they both make the same mistake. They both regard wine as a drug and not as a drink."
G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)
 

"Wine is sunlight, held together by water."
Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)
 

"Wine is grape juice. Every drop of liquid filling so many bottles has been drawn out of the ground by the roots of the vine."
Hugh Johnson, wine book author
 

"Wine is the pleasantest subject in the world to discuss. All its associations are with occasions when people are at their best; with relaxation, contentment, leisurely meals and the free flow of ideas."
Hugh Johnson, wine book author
 

"How I like claret!...It fills one's mouth with a gushing freshness, then goes down to cool and feverless; then, you do not feel it quarrelling with one's liver. No; 'tis rather a peace-maker, and lies as quiet as it did in the grape. Then it is as fragrant as the Queen Bee, and the more ethereal part mounts into the brain, not assaulting the cerebral apartments, like a bully looking for his trull, and hurrying from door to door, bouncing against the wainscott, but rather walks like Aladdin about his enchanted palace, so gently that you do not feel his step."
John Keats (1795-1821)
 

"This wine should be eaten, it is too good to be drunk."
Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)
 

"'Have some wine,' the March Hare said in an encouraging tone. Alice looked around the table, but there was nothing on it but tea. 'I don't see any wine,' she remarked. 'There isn't any,' said the March Hare."
Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) (1832-1898)
 

"Wine is the most healthful and most hygienic of beverages."
Louis Pasteur (1822-1895)
 

"Wine is a precarious aphrodisiac, and its fumes have blighted many a mating."
Norman Douglas, English writer (1868-1952)
 

"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. This is one of the disadvantages of wine: it makes a man mistake words for thoughts."
Samuel Johnson, English writer, lexicographer, critic and conversationalist (1709-1784)
 

"A glass of good wine is a gracious creature, and reconciles poor mortality to itself, and that is what few things can do."
Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832)
 

"Wine has a drastic, an astringent taste. I cannot help wincing as I drink. Ascent of flowers, radiance and heat, are distilled here to a fiery, yellow liquid. Just behind my shoulder-blades some dry thing, wide-eyed, gently closes, gradually lulls itself to sleep. This is rapture. This is relief."
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)
 

"The best wine is the oldest, the best water the newest."
William Blake (1757-1827)
 

“WINE, n. Fermented grape-juice known to the Women's Christian Union as 'liquor,' sometimes as 'rum.' Wine, madam, is God's next best gift to man.”
Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) 'The Devil's Dictionary' (1911)
 

“To make white wine out of red wine. Put bean-meal or three egg whites into the flask and stir for a very long time. The next day the wine will be white. The ashes of white grape vines have the same effect.”
Apicius
 

“On one occasion some one put a very little wine into a [glass], and said that it was sixteen years old. 'It is very small for its age,' said Gnathaena.”
Athenaeus, 'The Deipnosophists' (c. A.D. 200)
 

“We hear of the conversion of water into wine at the marriage in Cana as of a miracle. But this conversion is, through the goodness of God, made every day before our eyes. Behold the rain which descends from heaven upon our vineyards, and which incorporates itself with the grapes, to be changed into wine; a constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy.”
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
 

“Give strong drink unto him that is ready to perish, and wine unto those that be of heavy hearts. Let him drink, and forget his poverty, and remember his misery no more.”
Bible, Proverbs 31:6-7
 

“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
 

“What is man, when you come to think upon him, but a minutely set, ingenious machine for turning with infininite artfulness, the red wine of Shiraz into urine?"
Isak Dineson, Danish author (1885-1962)
 

“French wines may be said but to pickle meat in the stomach, but this is the wine that digests, and doth not only breed good blood, but it nutrifieth also, being a glutinous substantial liquor; of this wine, if of any other, may be verified that merry induction: That good wine makes good blood, good blood causeth good humors, good humors cause good thoughts, good thoughts bring forth good works, good works carry a man to heaven, ergo, good wine carrieth a man to heaven.”
James Howell (1594-1666)
 

“Wine is the drink of the gods, milk the drink of babes, tea the drink of women, and water the drink of beasts."
John Stuart Blackie (1809-1895)
 

“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 (1912-2004)
 

“’Tis pity wine should be so deleterious,
For tea and coffee leave us much more serious.”
Lord Byron (1788-1824)
 

“Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence"
Robert Fripp, guitarist and cofounder of the band King Crimson (1969)
 

“Wine makes a man more pleased with himself. I do not say that it makes him more pleasing to others.”
Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)Boswell's "Life of Johnson"
 

“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 (3rd President of U.S.)
 

“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 (3rd President of U.S.)
 

“To buy very good wine nowadays requires only money. To serve it to your guests is a sign of fatigue.”
William F. Buckley in ‘Harpers Bazaar’ (September, 1979)
 

“Good wine is a good familiar creature if it be well used.”
William Shakespeare
 

“In wine there is wisdom, in beer there is strength, in water there is bacteria.”
David Auerbach
 

“If wine disappeared from human production, I believe there would be, in the health and intellect of the planet, a void, a deficiency far more terrible than all the excesses and deviations for which wine is made responsible. Is it not reasonable to suggest that people that never drink wine, whether naive or doctrinaire, are fools or hypocrites....?”
Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), French poet
 

“Drink is in itself a good creature of God, and to be received with thankfulness, but the abuse of drink is from Satan, the wine is from God, but the Drunkard is from the Devil.”
Increase Mather (1639-1723), Boston minister and educator
 

“Place a substantial meal before a tired man and he will eat with effort and be little better for it at first.  Give him a glass of wine or brandy, and immediately he feels better: you see him come to life again before you.”
Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755-1826)
 

“The wine had such ill effects on Noah's health that it was all he could do to live 950 years. Just nineteen years short of Methuselah. Show me a total abstainer that ever lived that long.”
Will Rogers (1879-1935)
 

“Wine comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the eye;
That's all we shall know for truth
Before we grow old and die.
I lift the glass to my mouth,
I look at, and I sigh.”
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) Irish dramatist, poet.
 

“When you ask one friend to dine,
Give him you best wine!
When you ask two,
The second best will do!”
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, American poet (1807-1882)
 

“Wine is earth's answer to the sun.”
Margaret Fuller (1810-1850)
 

“If wine tells truth -- and so have said the wise,
It makes me laugh to think how brandy lies!”
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809-94) U.S. writer, physician
 

“In vino veritas.” (In wine there is truth.)
Pliny, Roman naturalist (A.D. 23-79)
 

“Wine is bottled poetry.”
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894)
 

“A fruit is a vegetable with looks and money. Plus, if you let fruit rot, it turns into wine, something Brussels sprouts never do.”
P. J. O'Rourke (1947 - )
 

“Wine is the intellectual part of a meal while meat is the material.”
Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870)
 

“Food without wine is a corpse; wine without food is a ghost; united and well matched they are as body and soul, living partners.”
Andre Simon (1877-1970)