Wine Quotes: Find Them Somewhere Else

Wine quotes are the literary equivalent of putting parsley on a steak: garnish with no nutritional value, there to disguise the fact that the plate looks a bit bare. Every wine website seems to feel obliged to litter its pages with them. “Wine is bottled poetry,” says Robert Louis Stevenson, dragged out of his grave for the thousandth time. Or Hemingway mumbling about “civilization” as though a glass of cheap Chianti could replace plumbing. Benjamin Franklin, bless him, is forced once again to claim that “wine is constant proof that God loves us,” though the poor man was talking about beer. We do not need Robert Parker’s metaphors, Rumi’s poetry, or some other half-baked theology to make wine matter. Wine already matters.

Wine itself is already interesting. It has geology, chemistry, agriculture, economics, scandal, fraud, and the occasional monk with dirty feet. Why water it down with reheated snippets of dead men trying to sound clever? The quotes are not useful; they don’t tell you how to serve Riesling at the right temperature, how to recognize cork taint, or why your Pinot Noir tastes like strawberry one year and mushroom the next. They are not instruction, they are filler.

Worse, they flatten wine into a cliché. Wine is not “poetry in a bottle.” Sometimes it’s vinegar in a bottle. Sometimes it’s a badly made Merlot that tastes like warm jam. Sometimes it’s a Grand Cru Burgundy that smells of truffles and sex. Reducing that vast spectrum to “Wine is life” is not wisdom, it’s bumper-sticker philosophy.

And yet, copywriters keep reaching for the quote jar like toddlers reaching for candy. Why? Because it’s easy. Because it makes the page look cozy. Because it gives the illusion of depth without requiring the labor of actually knowing something. Wine quotes are a shortcut around thought, a cheap patch in the fabric of content.

We don’t need them here. If we’re serious about wine - if we want to understand it, teach it, or even just drink it with attention - then we ought to use our own words. Describing what’s in the glass is infinitely richer than borrowing Franklin’s tired musings. A wine website plastered with quotations is like a restaurant that decorates the walls with “Live, Laugh, Love.” You know immediately that the kitchen isn’t worth trusting. 

This is a site for wine, not for recycled social media feeble-minded babble. So let’s leave all wine quotes where they belong: on instabook posts next to photoshop-sunsets and glamour imbeciles. Here, we’ll stick to the wine itself - the messy, contradictory, beautiful, and very real thing in the glass. No garnish required. And no wine-quote bullshit here from now on.