Posts Tagged ‘Wine Quotes’

and how will YOU be celebrating tomorrow’s presidential holiday? mutton? hard-bop?

February 17, 2013

It’s true, George Washington did indeed seem to innately understand the ritual importance of wine, the conventional purity of wine, the canonical vitality of wine …

My manner of living is plain and I do not mean to be put out of it. A glass of wine and a bit of mutton are always ready

And it seems to be rather unimpeachably true that it wasn’t until Abraham Lincoln’s tenure in the White House that wine was “officially” served at an Official White House function (we appear to actually have Mary Todd Lincoln to thank for that!).

But truth be told, if you REALLY wish to celebrate tomorrow, you REALLY ought to plan on drinking wine and listening to the great saxophonist Harold Land.

Because he was born February 18th. And that’s tomorrow.

So, wanna REALLY get yer Jazz & Wine bona fides on?

Then take a moment tomorrow to sit with a glass of good wine and dig “Kisses Sweeter Than Wine” as performed by the  Harold Land-Carmell Jones Quintet; one of the most brilliant and most woefully under-celebrated jazz ensembles ever to emerge from the bop-hard bop idiom.

Land_Jones_Wine

Hey! Here’s an idea! Don’t sit at home, come join us!

That’s right, I personally invite you to contact our Monte Bello Estate, and request a tasting. Call early enough tomorrow, and we can try and slot you in at 11am. Too early? Ok, how’s 2pm sound? Good? Good!

Hey, here’s an even better idea; book online RIGHT NOW! (see link below). 

But whatever you do, remember, Monte Bello is BY APPOINTMENT ONLY on weekdays, so even though it’s a holiday, Presidents Day still counts as a weekday, which means you still need an appointment!

Wine, Harold Land, you, me, the Presidents … groovy.

~

And for those of you who can’t get to our mountain, have no fear, Lytton Springs is here! 7 days a week in Sonoma! You just GOT to have a go! (See link below!)

~

One nation, under jazz, with cabernet and grooviness for all.

~

Visit Monte Bello

Visit Lytton Springs

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Posted in Cabernet Sauvignon, History, Lytton Springs, Monte Bello, Special Offerings, Tasting Events/Opportunities, Tasting Rooms, Wine & Music, Wine and Jazz | Leave a Comment »

On The Road Again: Wine, Jack Kerouac, and Me

September 5, 2011

Two things you may or may not know:

1. Today is the anniversary of the day when Jack Kerouac’s immeasurably culture-changing novel “On The Road” was released; one of the most influential American novels in the history of American letters.

2. Some years ago, courtesy of a wonderful literary grant I received, I was given the opportunity to live and write in the very same house Jack Kerouac was living in when “On the Road” was released.

So it is with special pleasure that I celebrate this special anniversary.

And I wish to share with you a great quote –a great WINE quote– from this incomparably strange, challenging, exhilarating, maddening, delightful, beautifully flawed and magical book:

 

“Ah, it was a fine night, a warm night, a wine-drinking night, a moony night, and a night to hug your girl and talk and spit and be heavengoing. This we did.”
 
 
That, my friends, is wine.
 
 
Also, here is a photo for you; my writing room in the Kerouac House; the very same room where Jack, while awaiting publication of “On The Road,” was already beginning what would become his second novel, “The Dharma Bums.”
 

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Posted in History, Wine & Poetry, Wine Quotes | 3 Comments »

Percy Bysshe Shelley

July 8, 2010

Today is the day we mark the passing of the renowned romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who left this world on July 8, 1882.

Husband to the author Mary Shelley, friend and companion to both Byron and Keats, influence on, and idol to, generations of writers and thinkers (among them Thoreau, Gandhi, George Bernard Shaw, and Upton Sinclair), Shelley casts a long shadow across our worlds of letters, our realms of thought, and our rich creative history.

Eminently quotable, I have noted him today as to afford myself the opportunity to share what I consider to be one of the more lovely quotes incorporating wine I’ve ever read. Before that though, my absolute favorite quote from Shelley:

Familiar acts are beautiful through love.

Just utterly beautiful, and so, so true.

And as to wine:

I have drunken deep of joy, and I will taste no other wine tonight.

Wine as joy. Perfect.

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Wine Quote Of The Week!

April 27, 2010

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!

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Wine Quote Of The Week!

March 23, 2010

Today’s quotes come to us from Yoshida Kenko, a highly regarded and influential scholar and Buddhist monk, who wrote well into the mid-fourteenth century. His most famous contribution to spiritual literature was a series of  informal essays that are more often than not collected under the translated title of “Essays In Idleness”; the Japanese title is “Tsurezuregusa.” The quotes are from this collection.

 

It seems to me the first quote is an almost haiku-esque (note the seasonal reference to cherry blossoms!) comment on the importance of Awareness Rituals, and that the second is a sort of  poetic rumination on the archetypal Buddhist subject of Right Conduct; I offer them to you with great pleasure in the content of the first, and great agreement with the perspective of the second:

“On a moonlit night, after a snowfall, or under cherry blossoms, it adds to our pleasure if, while chatting at our ease, we bring forth the wine cups.”

“One should write not unskillfully in the running hand, be able to sing in a pleasing voice and keep good time to music; and, lastly, a man should not refuse a little wine when it is pressed upon him.”

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Wine Quote Of The Week!

February 16, 2010

I’ve certainly written about Haiku before, and certainly about wine as awareness ritual, and the following is for me a wonderful opportunity to enjoy the cojoinment of both in a single set of 17 glorious syllables. Unfortunately the source remains unknown to us today, so we’ve no one to thank for this elegant pearl of insight, but this does not dampen in the slightest my appreciation for the sentiment. The Japanese is as follows:

Sake nakuta
Nan no onore ga
Sakura kana

Which can be translated as:

Without flowing wine
What good to me are lovely
Cherry trees in bloom?

Let the wine flow, friends, let the wine flow …

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Wine Quote Of The Week!

February 9, 2010

For this week’s quote, we turn to an ageless wisdom culled from a vast repository of anonymous Latin Proverbs carried down through the ages to our present times. And lest ye doubt the sageness of said wells of wit, do recall the following icons of insight as having had similar origin:

“Art has no enemy except ignorance”

“By learning you will teach, by teaching you will learn.”

“All the hours wound you, the last one kills.”

“Every madman thinks all other men mad.”

And of course the very well-known “In Vino Veritas,” which is rather on-point for our purposes here. But it’s not our quote of the week, rather, I submit the following:

It is well to remember that there are five reasons for drinking: the arrival of a friend, one’s present or future thirst, the excellence of the wine, or any other reason.

Cheers!

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Wine Quote Of The Week!

February 4, 2010

Well, I’ll concede it, I’ve gotten my Ts mixed-up; I was to post this on Tuesday, and here it is Thursday; an alphebetary aberration of a sort, but one I’ll hope to rectify with the following quote, a rather excellent contribution to the “Priorities, Priorities” folder in every individual’s psychological filing cabinet, and one which comes to us from the very, very, very great James Joyce:

“What is better than to sit at the end of the day and drink wine with friends, or substitutes for friends?”

Now, that’s not to try and give you the impression that Ol’ Mr. Joyce was just another run-of-the-mill curmudgeonly foodie, no, no sirree, in fact, it’s rather clear he had a decidedly peculiar way of sussing the culinary pleasures of the world, as is perhaps evidenced by the following most striking of quotes (and I’ll preface this by saying that I sincerely hope this is my only post to end with the three words this one ends with!) :

“A corpse is meat gone bad. Well and what’s cheese? Corpse of milk.”

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New Wine Quote Of The Week!

January 26, 2010

It’s Tuesday again, and that means it’s wine quote time! Today’s offering is, I believe, somewhat well-known, though it’s such a strange one I’m pleased to present it nonetheless. It comes to us from the mind of the great Pulitzer-Prize-winning humorist Art Buchwald (who sadly left us just over two years ago), and the specific subject of his quote is one of my personal favorite topics; champys! So here we go:

“I like Champagne, because it always tastes as though my foot’s asleep.”

Bravo! We miss you Art!

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Wine Quote Of The Week: From Our King Curmudgeon W.C. Fields!

January 19, 2010

Well, it’s Tuesday, and on Tuesdays, I’m going to start sharing favorite quotes on wine. My absolute and total favorite collection of quotes, observations, witticisms,  aphorisms, and more, has always been “The Portable Curmudgeon,” and I will draw from it today for our Wine Quote of choice. The line comes from perhaps the True-Crowned King of Crankiness, the Clown Prince of Cynics, the Godfather of Grumps, good ol’ Egbert Souse (pronounced Sue-Say) himself, Mr. W.C. Fields, who rather famously once asked:

“What contemptible scoundrel stole the cork from my lunch?”

And speaking of which (and to borrow a bit of prose from one Winnie the Pooh, the creator of whom was born just yesterday, albeit many years ago, that being A.A. Milne), I must say, “I am so rumbly in my tumbly …”

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