Wine Quotes

Read our collection of famous quotes about wine. We have a great array. Find a literary wine quote (including Shakespeare), a food quote about wine, humorous wine quotes, a quote about wine and life, quotes on wine tasting and lot more. Enjoy!

"Three be the things I shall never attain: Envy, content, and sufficient champagne."
Dorothy Parker

"I am drinking the stars!"
Dom Perignon, on his first sip of bubbly Champagne

"What contemptible scoundrel stole the cork from my lunch?"
W.C. Fields

"Sorrow can be alleviated by good sleep, a bath and a glass of good wine."
St. Thomas Aquinas

"Wine in itself is an excellent thing."
Pope Pius XII Airen

"One of the disadvantages of wine is that it makes a man mistake words for thoughts."
Samuel Johnson

"It had the taste of an apple peeled with a steel knife."
- Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
Sebastian Barnack, in Time Must Have a Stop, ch 12 (1944)
Assessing a Roederer 1916 champagne.

"By making this wine vine known to the public, I have rendered my country as great a service as if I had enabled it to pay back the national debt."
Thomas Jefferson

"Wine makes daily living easier, less hurried, with fewer tensions and more tolerance."
Benjamin Franklin

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

"Wine is the most civilized thing in the world."
Ernest Hemingway.

"I drink champagne when I win, to celebrate
... and I drink champagne when I lose to console myself."
Napoleon

"If penicillin can cure those that are ill, Spanish sherry can bring the dead back to life."
Sir Alexander Fleming

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

"Remember gentlemen, it's not just France we are fighting for, it's Champagne!"
Winston S. Churchill, 1918

"Wine to me is passion.  It's family and friends. It's warmth of heart and generosity of spirit. Wine is art. It's culture. It's the essence of civilization and the art of living."
Robert Mondavi, "Harvests Of Joy," Autobiography

"Drink a glass of wine after your soup and you steal a ruble from your doctor."
Russian proverb

"A mind of the caliber of mine cannot derive its nutrient from cows."
George Bernard Shaw

"You have only so many bottles in your life, never drink a bad one."
Len Evans

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

"Wine ...moderately drunken 
It doth quicken a man's wits,
It doth comfort the heart."
Andrew Boorde,  1562, "Dyetary of Helth"

"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

"Wine has been a part of civilized life for some seven thousand years. It is the only beverage that feeds the body, soul and spirit of man and at the same time stimulates the mind."
Robert Mondavi, "Harvests Of Joy," Autobiography

"Making good wine is a skill. Fine wine is an art."
Robert Mondavi, "Harvests Of Joy," Autobiography

"A hard drinker, being at the table, was offered grapes for dessert. 'Thank you,' said he, pushing the dish away from him, 'but I am not in the habit of taking my wine in pills.'"
Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, "The Physiology of Taste"

"Fermented beverages have been preferred over water throughout the ages: they are safer, provide psychotropic effects, and are more nutritious. Some have even said alcohol was the primary agent for the development of Western civilization, since more healthy individuals (even if inebriated much of the time) lived longer and had greater reproductive success. "
Dr. Patrick McGovern, et al., The Origin & Ancient History of Wine

"It had the taste of an apple peeled with a steel knife."
Aldous Huxley (1894–1963),Sebastian Barnack, in Time Must Have a Stop, ch 12 (1944), assessing a Roederer 1916 champagne.

When Lily Bollinger was asked "When do you drink champagne?", she replied:
"I only drink champagne when I'm happy, and when I'm sad.
Sometimes I drink it when I'm alone. When I have company, I consider it obligatory.
I trifle with it if I am not hungry and drink it when I am.
Otherwise I never touch it - unless I'm thirsty."

"The cheapness of wine seems to be a cause, not of drunkenness, but of sobriety.  ...People are seldom guilty of excess in what is their daily fare...On the contrary, in the countries which, either from excessive heat or cold, produce no grapes, and where wine consequently is dear and a rarity, drunkenness is a common vice."
Adam Smith, "The Wealth of Nations"

"So far as drinking is concerned, you have my hearty approval; for wine does of a truth moisten the soul and lull our griefs to sleep....[and with small cups] we shall ...be brought by its gentle persuasion to a more sportive mood."
Xenophon, quoting Socrates

"Burgundy makes you think of silly things, Bordeaux makes you talk of them and Champagne makes you do them."
Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

"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." 
Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

"The good talk that is inseparable from a wine dinner is even more important than the wines that are being served. Never bring up your better bottles if you are entertaining a man who cannot talk.  Keep your treasures for a night when those few who are nearest to your heart can gather round your table, free from care, with latchkeys in their pockets and no last train to catch."
Maurice Healy, Claret

"After-dinner talk
Across the walnuts and the wine."
Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1892), The Miller's Daughter, 31

"Pour out the wine without restraint or stay,
Pour not by cups, but by the bellyful,
Pour out to all that will."
Edmund Spenser, Epithalamion, 250

"And they drank the red wine through the helmet barr'd."
Sir Walter Scott

"By comparing what we know today with what the ancients appear to have known we can guess at the kinds of wine they drank."
Alec Waugh

"What though youth gave love and roses, age still leaves us friends and wine."
Thomas Moore

"Burgundy for Kings, Champagne for Duchesses, and claret for Gentlemen."
French Proverb

"May our love be like good wine, grow stronger as it grows older."
Old English Toast

"Age appears to be best in four things - old wood best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read."
L. Bacon

"Fill every beaker up, my men, pour forth the cheering wine: there's life and strength in every drop, thanksgiving to the vine!"
Albert Gorton Greene

"Drink to me only with thine eyes and I will pledge with mine; or leave a kiss but in the cup, and I'll not look for wine."
Ben Johnson

"I drank at every vine, the last was like the first. I came upon no wine so wonderful as thirst."
Edna St. Vincent Millay

"Good wine is a good familiar creature if it be well used."
William Shakespeare, ( Othello)

"Good wine needs no bush."
William Shakespeare, ( As You Like It, Epilogue)

"Give me a bowl of wine,
In this I bury all unkindness."
William Shakespeare, (Julius Caesar)

"Give me a bowl of wine:
have not that alacrity of spirit,
Nor cheer of mind, that I was wont to have."
William Shakespeare, (Richard III).

"Wine is a good familiar creature if it be will used, exclaim no more against it."
William Shakespeare, (Othello)

"Wine is wont to show the mind of man."
Theogenis

"With years a richer life begins, the spirit mellow: ripe age gives tones to violins, wine, and good fellows."
John Townsend Trowbridge

"Burgundy was the winiest wine, the central, essential, and typical wine, the soul and greatest common measure of all the kindly wines of the earth."
Charles Edward Montague

"Claret is the liquor for boys, port for men; but he who aspires to be a hero must drink brandy."
Samuel Johnson

"I like Champagne, because it always tastes as though my foot's asleep."
Art Buchwald

"Wine is a food."
Oliver Wendell Holmes

"Wine can be considered with good reason as the most healthful and the most hygienic of all beverages."
Louis Pasteur

"The flavor of wine is like delicate poetry."
Louis Pasteur

"One not only drinks the wine, one smells it, observes it, tastes it, sips it and--one talks about it."
King Edward VII

"When a man drinks wine at dinner, he begins to be better pleased with himself."
Plato

"Wine fills the heart with courage."
Plato

"Wine improves with age - I like it the older I get."
Anonymous

"Wine is sunlight, held together by water!"
Galileo Gallilei

"Away with you, water, destruction of wine!"
Catullus

"Drink wine in winter for cold, and in summer for heat."
Anonymous

"Where there is no wine there is no love."
Euripides

"Wine is at the head of all medicines; where wine is lacking, drugs are necessary."
The Talmud

"A full cup of wine at the right time is worth more than all the kingdoms of this earth!"
Gustav Mahler, Das Lied Von Der Erde

"Be moderate in order to taste the joys of life in abundance."
Epicurus

"How is Champagne made? By sheer genius, sir, sheer genius!"
Anonymous, Conversation At White's Club, London

"Nothing equals the joy of the drinker except the joy of the wine being drunk."
Anonymous

"Description of a corkscrew:...the wine lover's best friend and the rarest of tools."
Anonymous