Wine buffs write and talk as though the food and wine will be in your mouth at the same time, that one is there to be poured over the other. This is bullshit. Gustatory enjoyment comes from food and wine and cigars of your liking. So far no one has said that a Monte Cristo is the only cigar to smoke after Armagnac, Romeo and Juliet after Calvados … but the time may yet come.
Clement Freud
“…No-one Else Has Complained”
Wino Forever
Johnny Depp
(The tattoo once read ‘Winona Forever’!)
Souls of poets dead and gone,
What Elysium have ye known,
Happy field or mossy cavern,
Choicer than the Mermaid Tavern?
Have ye tippled drink more fine
Than mine host’s Canary wine?
John Keats (1795–1821)
Lines on the Mermaid Tavern
And Noah he often said to his wife when he sat down to dine,
‘I don’t care where the water goes if it doesn’t get into the wine’.
K. Chesterton(1874–1936)
Wine and Water
Fill high the cup with Samian wine!
Lord Byron (1788–1824)
Don Juan, III. 86. 9
His element is so fine
Being sharpened by his death,
To drink from the wine-breath
While our gross palates drink from the whole wine.
B.Yeats (1865-1939)
All Souls’ Night
A man not old, but mellow, like good wine,
Stephen Phillips (1845-1915)
Ulysses, III. Ii
Ah, wasteful woman, she who may
On her sweet self set her own price,
Knowing man cannot choose but pay,
How has she cheapened paradise;
How given for nought her priceless gift,
How spoiled the bread and spilled the wine,
Which, spent with due respective thrift,
Had made brutes men and men divine.
Coventry Patmore (1823-1896)
The Angel in the House, Bk i. 3, Prelude 3
Seamen three! what men be ye?
Gotham’s three Wise Men we be.
Whither in your bowl so free?
To rake the moon from out the sea.
The bowl goes trim. The moon doth shine,
And our ballast is old wine.
L. Peacock (1785-1866)
Nightmare Abbey, Ch. 11, ‘Three Men of Gotham’
Go, little book, and wish to all
Flowers in the garden, meat in the hall,
A bin of wine, a spice of wit,
A house with lawns enclosing it,
A living river by the door,
A nightingale in the sycamore!
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894)
Underwoods, I. 1, ‘Envoy’
