“Modern restaurant cooking is first and foremost a boat that, as in a Saul Steinberg drawing, steams its way downriver from the thousand dreamy islands of alcohol to the wide beckoning current of caffeine, from the stress-busting drink to the reawakening demitasse. A modern French meal not including both…is impossible to imagine. Dinner with water is dinner for prisoners.”

Adam Gopnik

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“I found the tide of wine and wassail fast gaining on the dry land of sober judgment.”

Washington Irving

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“I like on the table,
when we’re speaking,
the light of a bottle
of intelligent wine.”

Pablo Neruda

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“As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans.”

Ernest Hemingway

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“People who habitually drink water become just as good gourmets about water as wine drinkers about wine. For fifty or sixty years of my life, I have drunk only water, and no lover of wine has ever felt the same delight in some Grand-Laffite or Chambertin as I have in a glass of cool spring water whose purity has not been tainted by any earthy salts.”

Alexandre Dumas

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