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The Appreciation of Wine

Wednesday, 17th October 2012 by Jo Purcell

If someone asks you what you do for a living, and you reply that you work in the wine trade, their instant reaction is pretty much unanimous and goes something along the lines of: "How lucky you are!" "Wow, a job where you can drink wine everyday!" Well, working in the wine trade isn’t quite like that, but I do feel very lucky to have entered a career that I love and do look forward to going to work everyday. Working for Farr Vintners means that as well as getting to taste and sell some of the finest wines in the world, we also get to meet some of the most interesting and fascinating people; and over the years many of these people have become good friends. Wine provides a means of building relationships, and whilst I enjoy tasting and selling fine wines, I also value these relationships.

The other weekend we were invited to Sunday lunch by one such friend who I met through Farr Vintners. Nowadays in Hong Kong you can find virtually everything you could possibly want, but we still have hankerings for those good old favourites which remind us of home. So when we found out that roast beef and Yorkshire pudding were on the menu a big smile came across our faces (especially my husband's!). At this lunch our host summarised what wine had meant in his life and followed up with a series of quotes on the subject of wine by famous people which we all found very amusing. Some of these appear below with details of some of the authors in a light-hearted attempt to show that it is not only those of us at Farr Vintners who appreciate fine wine!

  • Where there is no wine there is no love – Euripides
  • A bottle of good wine, like a good act, shines ever in the retrospect – Robert Louis Stevenson
  • Wine gives great pleasure; and every pleasure is of itself a good – Samuel Johnson
    Joan Collins
  • Age is just a number. It’s totally irrelevant unless, of course, you happen to be a bottle of wine – Joan Collins
  • Compromises are for relationships, not wine – Sir Robert Scott Caywood
  • Woman first tempted man to eat; he took to drinking of his own accord – John Philip Kemble
  • Here’s to the corkscrew – a useful key to unlock the storehouse of wit, the treasury of laughter, the front door of fellowship and the gate of pleasant folly! – W.E.P.French
  • Men are like wine – some turn to vinegar, but the best improve with age – Pope John XXIII
  • A waltz and a glass of wine invite an encore – Johann Strauss
  • A woman drove me to drink, and I’ll be a son-of-a-gun but I never even wrote to thank her – W.C.Fields
    W.C.Fields
  • Wine makes daily living easier, less hurried, with fewer tensions and more tolerance – Benjamin Franklin
  • In victory you deserve Champagne, in defeat you need it – Napoleon Bonaparte
  • Clearly, the pleasures wines afford are transitory – but so are those of the ballet, or of a musical performance. Wine is inspiring and adds greatly to the joy of living – Napoleon Bonaparte
    Napoleon Bonaparte
  • Wine… the intellectual part of the meal – Alexandre Dumas
  • Penicillin cures but wine makes people happy – Sir Alexander Fleming
  • Wine is the most civilized thing in the world – Ernest Hemingway
  • Wine is bottled poetry – Robert Louis Stevenson
  • Burgundy makes you think of silly things, Bordeaux makes you talk of them and champagne makes you do them – Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
  • Remember gentlemen, it's not just France we are fighting for, it's Champagne! – Sir Winston Churchill
  • Wine is life – Petronius
  • Never did a great man hate good wine – Francois Rabelais
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