Actually, this week, we’ll be looking at not one but three wine-themed quotes, and we’ll be going to some of our greatest literary craftspeople for the contributions: Virginia Woolf, Charles Baudelaire, and John Keats, each of whom below offers us rather fantastical rhapsodies on the mental, emotional, and physiological singularlies of wine consumption.
From Keats first we have the following:
“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.”
Evocative, no? Rather makes me wish I had some claret strolling about my enchanted palace!
Next, we’ll go to Virginia Woolf, for this remarkable gem:
“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.”
Quite a journey there, and to think I started off reading this imagining she didn’t like wine!
Lastly, from the great French poet Charles Baudelaire, comes these beautific lines:
“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….?”
He said it, not me!
