Fine wine is a living liquid containing no preservatives. Its life comprises youth, maturity, old age, and death. When not treated with reasonable respect it will sicken and die. – Julia Child, Louisette Bertholle, and Simone Beck, Mastering the Art of French C

Life is a chaplet of little miseries, which the philosopher unstrings with a smile. Be philosophers as I am, gentlemen; sit down to the table and let us drink; nothing makes the future look so bright as surveying it through a glass of chambertin. – Alexandre Dumas, The Three Musketeers (1844), “Chapter XLVII: A Family Affair,”

For some obscure reason, some authorities seem bent on making the drinking of wine a ritual more complicated than chess. They have succeeded in inhibiting a large section of the public and depriving them of one of the greatest pleasures known to man. – Craig Claiborne, New York Times Cookbook