Wine Quotes

Here is a collection of wine quotations:

If food is the body of good living, wine is its soul.  Clifton Fadiman

Wine is bottled poetry.  Robert Louis Stevenson

Good wine is a necessity of life for me.  Thomas Jefferson

I made a mental note to watch which bottle became empty soonest, sometimes a more telling evaluation system than any other.  Gerald Asher

Making good wine is a skill;  making fine wine is an art.  Robert Mondavi

Wine makes every meal an occasion, every table more elegant, every day more civilized.  Andre Simon

Life is too short to drink bad wine.  Anonymous

Drinking good wine with good food in good company is one of life's most civilized pleasures.  Michael Broadbent

Though I'm no doctor, just the idea of drinking wine over a leisurely meal has a positive effect (on health) by virtue of the fact that it is elegant, relaxing and fun.  Robert Parker

"De gustibus non est disputandum."  There is no disputing matters of taste.

There are no standards of taste in wine, cigars, poetry, prose, etc.  Each man's own taste is the standard, and a majority vote cannot decide for him or in any slightest degree affect the supremacy of his own standard.  Mark Twain

Never buy the cheapest wine in any category, as its taste may discourage you from going on.  Cheap wine will always be too expensive.  Alex Bespaloff

I know never to take a wine for granted.  Drawing a cork is like attendance at a concert or at a play one knows well, when there is all the uncertainty of no two performances ever being quite the same.  That is why the French say, "There are no good wines, only good bottles."  Gerald Asher

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 of appreciation and enjoyment than, possibly, any other purely sensory thing.  Ernest Hemingway

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

Wine is an endless treasure trove of fascination.  Wine is the only beverage in the world that draws us in intellectually, causes us to think about it, to ponder it, to question why it tastes the way it does.  Wine, it seems to me, is compelling not solely because it tastes good (though it surely does that) but because it appeals to the mind.  Karen MacNeil

In 1995, I predicted that first-growth Bordeaux would hit $10,000 per case in ten years;  well, they have done that and then some, and in a much shorter period.  This trend will only continue.  Unfortunately, many of these wines will become nothing more than museum pieces to be talked about and traded, but rarely drunk.  Robert Parker

One of the most gratifying aspects of being a wine critic is discovering those under-the-radar, superb wine bargains that taste as if they should cost two or three times the price but don't. ... The myth is that wines that cost $25 or less are worth just what you pay for them and are never terribly interesting.  This is totally untrue, and with work, one can unearth these small treasures that deliver seriously good wine at remarkably fair prices.  Robert Parker

On the 2005 vintage in France:  "If I had to give two words of advice to lovers of French wine today, scouting in any price range, they would be "O" and "five."  The 2005 vintage seemed exceptional at the time, virtually throughout France and especially in the classic regions of Bordeaux and Burgundy.  Now that we can judge the wines in bottle, it continues to shine brilliantly. ...  I still feel this is by far the greatest Bordeaux vintage I have been lucky enough to taste.  And it's the consistency right down to the petit chateaux and lowly AC Bordeaux level that is so exciting.  Jancis Robinson

It is well to remember that there are five reasons to drink wine:  the arrival of a friend; one's present or future thirst; the excellence of the wine; or any other reason.  Latin saying

Here's to the corkscrew -- a useful key to unlock the storehouse of wit, the treasury of laughter, the front door of fellowship, and the gate of pleasant folly.  W.E.P. French

He who loves not wine, women and song -- remains a fool his whole life long.  Johann Voss

The discovery of a wine is of greater moment than the discovery of a constellation.  The universe is too full of stars.  Benjamin Franklin

A sight of the label is worth 50 years experience.  Michael Broadbent

Anyone who tries to make you believe that he knows all about wines is obviously a fake.  Leon Adams

On drinking the wines of Bordeaux:  "The French drink them young, so a Socialist government won't take them.  The English drink them old, so they can show their friends cobwebs and dusty bottles.  The Americans drink them exactly when they are ready, because they don't know any better."  Anonymous

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

U.S. Market Flooded by Cheap Bulk Wine

The Press Democrat, my local newspaper, had an interesting article on the wine industry this morning.  The first paragraph read, "California wine shipments dropped in 2009 for the first time in 16 years as major U. S. wine companies looked overseas for the cheap wines that cash-strapped consumers increasingly crave."

Wines selling below $7 a bottle are experiencing a surge in demand while higher-end wines are seeing decreased sales, and demand has dropped sharply for the most expensive wines.  Jon Fredrikson, a wine industry analyst, commented, "It was ugly.  Many people I have talked to said it was the worst year in their history.  For small and medium-sized wineries, the year was brutal, as consumers shunned higher-priced wines."

Even though shipments from California decreased in 2009, U.S. wine consumption increased overall.  Market share has shifted from higher-priced wines to boxed wine and lower-priced wine.  Wine shipments have also increased substantially to Asia, especially to China and Southeast Asia.

Bulk wine shipments from overseas -- that turn into lower-priced wine and boxed wine -- have soared.  The largest U.S. wineries have been able to capitalize on the "trading-down" phenomenon by tapping into the globalized supply of cheap wine.  The amount of imported bulk wine increased 87% from 2008 to 2009.  Most of this wine was then bottled in the U.S. and sold as either boxed wine or 750 ml. bottles priced from $3.99 to $6.99.

Many traditional wineries thought that bulk wines couldn't compete, but the improving quality of these bulk wines is changing consumers' ideas about how much they need to spend to get a decent bottle of wine.  This trend of U.S. wineries outsourcing wine had been growing steadily in the past 10 years, but it exploded in 2009.

Occasionally, I'll try a bottle or two of the wine that normally sells for under $7 a bottle.  Some of it is surprisingly good IMO, especially for use as weekday table wine.  For example, I found the 2009 Mendoza Station Sauvignon Blanc ($6.99 at Total Wine, as discussed previously) to be very good.  And IMO the 2007 La Vieille Ferme "Cotes du Ventoux" Rouge (Cotes du Rhone) is a very good to excellent wine that happens to sell for under $7 (see prior post).

I've found most of the brands under $7, however, tend to be flat, one-dimensional, and lacking in structure or character.  But you only need to find one decent red wine and one decent white wine to use as regular table wines.