The Inside Story from Italian Wine Merchants

Wine and Words? Best Wine Quotes, Ever?

What’s your favorite wine quote?

Last week the editor of Inside IWM wrote a post inspired by a long quote from a book, and reading that piece got me thinking about some of my favorite wine-related quotes. I’m not much for reading British novels, but I’m glad to have scrounged up more than a handful of wise, compelling and interesting things that other people have said about wine. Without further ado, here are three of my favorite wine quotes and why I love them.

“How it’s a living thing…. I like to think about what was going on the year the grapes were growing; how the sun was shining; if it rained. I like to think about all the people who tended and picked the grapes. And if it’s an old wine, how many of them have passed on by now. I like how wine continues to evolve, like if I opened a bottle of wine today it would taste different than if I’d opened it on any other day, because a bottle of wine is actually alive. And it’s constantly evolving and gaining complexity. That is, until it peaks, like your ’61. And then it begins its steady, inevitable decline … And it tastes so f***ing good.” –Maya, played by Virginia Madsen, in Sideways

I was in my senior year of college when Sideways came out, and I was religiously studying wine. I was obsessed with wine, and this was one of those quotes that solidified my decision to pursue a career in wine. When I first saw and heard this quote in the film Sideways, I felt the hair on the back of my neck jump, as if a beautiful woman was brushing the nape of my neck with her hand. Virginia Madsen’s character Maya’s quote uses just a few short lines to capture all the important aspects of wine: the harvest, the evolution in the bottle, and the end result. I wanted to jump into the screen and kiss Maya. This scene is one of the most beautiful moments for wine in any film ever made.

Later that year Madsen was on the cover of Wine Enthusiast Magazine. I framed that issue because of this quote. Or mostly because of that quote, anyway.

“Let’s be honest: there’s only one activity more satisfying than drinking good wine with good food; and if you’re drinking wine in the right company, the one pleasure, more often than not, will lead to the other!” –Jay McInerney, Hedonist in the Cellar: Adventures in Wine

Jay hits the nail on the head, and because of his exactitude, his is my very favorite wine quote. It’s so spot on that I’m very surprised many wine people don’t mention this quote more often. I can remember reading this and saying to myself, “This guy gets it.” Wine is one of those few things that make you feel so warm and cozy inside. It gets the blood flowing. This quote makes me think of two people sitting on a couch next to the fire sipping a glass of their favorite red, each gazing deeply and passionately into one another’s eyes, each savoring the moment and yet looking forward to even more pleasurable moments to come. Kudos to Jay McInerney for giving voice to the sensual aspects of wine and how enjoying it can lead to more than just a hangover.

“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

The anchor to this quote for me is “family and friends.” There is nothing more gratifying to me than sitting around a table with my family and my friends, enjoying great food and wine. It’s one of the most meaningful, nurturing and special experiences in life. But what makes raises this quote and makes it spectacular is how Mondavi doesn’t just reference family, but the whole of human civilization. He seems to suggest that the art of wine is so important because same type of vine grown in two separate areas of the world, handled by different winemaking techniques can produce significantly different results. And these different results shape the culture that made them. Embedded in these two short lines is the rich history of wine, the way wine affected cultures throughout the history of the world, and how the world’s peoples were touched by wine. Mondavi understood that wine was more than just a beverage—wine brings people together in a wonderful, joyous, historical way!

On Reading Food and Eating Words

Thwarting Chaos, One Letter at a Time

I’m a writer, teacher of writing, college professor, and the editor of this blog. I’ve been writing for IWM and for Sergio Esposito for almost two years, and I have a confession: I can’t spell. My spelling makes F. Scott Fitzgerald’s look like H.L. Mencken’s, which is to say pretty egregious indeed. My inability to spell is a deep-seated failure, a source of some embarrassment, and an ongoing shame. I’ve never had much interest in spelling; putting the letters in the correct order has always taken a distant second place to arranging words in aesthetically pleasing and emotionally true syntax.

I can’t spell in English, and I can spell even less well in Italian, French or Food. I therefore have a tremendous and involuntary response of compassion for the poor beleaguered White House menu writer who completely botched the menu for the Obama’s most recent—and first—state dinner last Tuesday night.

As the New York Times reported in its blog The Caucus, the Obamas went all-out to thrill their guests with a newly hired star chef, a tasty menu and a series of carefully chosen complementary wines. Anahad O’Connor reports, “one person the White House apparently neglected to hire was a spell checker.  The special dinner menu — a lavish mélange of Indian and American favorites as well as several excellent wines — was rife with typos.” (You can read the full story here, and you can also find it all over the web—so horrified were journalists and copy editors everywhere.)

Reading that the menu misspelled “Grenache” as “Granache,” divided “chickpeas” into two words, and violently excised an “l” from “Willamette,” the hyphen from “Thibaut-Janisson” and the accent from “geleé,” I felt a profound sense of kinship. Nothing has made me as acutely aware of my spelling deficiencies like having to bang out “Sassicaia,” “Grattamacco,” and “Friuli-Venezia Giulia” on a regular basis. About the only thing that gives me a more consistent horrorsloth of humiliation than having to look up those words each and every time I type them is attempting to say them aloud. Uttering “Castello dei Rampolla’s Vigna d’Alceo” or “Sandrone Barolo Cannubi Boschis” is tantamount to slipping on a Hawaiian shirt so badly does my pronunciation brand me an ugly American.

And yet while I feel a great tenderness for the individual who made the errors on the White House menu, and while that tenderness radiates out to the humming committee who approved it, the hard-nosed editor can’t quite condone it. If the White House can’t spell the menu for their first state dinner correctly, what hope is there for us hoi polloi? We might as well serve a red wine with shrimp curry or call a varietal a variety. It would be complete gastronomic chaos. And no one wants that, however correctly spelled.