This quip appeared yesterday and joined a quotations file:
-- "With wine, as with so many wonderful things in life, you can never know it all.
"This doesn't stop some people from thinking they do..."
-- Eric Asimov, _The New York Times,_ 9 May 2007 page D6.
Adding to previous installment (27 July 2005), a few more remarks related one way or another to wine, from the original sources:
-- "Avec une complaisance sans limites, M. le Baron Pichon a bien voulu mettre à ma disposition les trésors de sa bibliothèque ..." -- Vicaire, 1890.
-- "Wine Hokum, broadly speaking, is all the things people can find out about wine without ever drinking it. Wine Hokum may be regarded as a parasitic fungus growth that can gain foothold on its host only where the tonic lifeblood of experiment, enthusiasm, and enjoyment is absent." -- Schoonmaker and Marvel, _American Wines, _ Duell, Sloan and Pearce (New York), 1941.
-- "There is a much-quoted Burgundian saying about Chambertin, that it is 'like the Good Lord in velvet trousers, gliding down your gullet.' This strikes me as one of the silliest among the many silly sayings about wine. But Chambertin is certainly velvety." -- Harold Waldo Yoxall, _The Wines of Burgundy,_ 1968 or 1978 [Quotation identical in both editions. -- MH]
-- "Romanée-Conti was fed in spoonfuls to Louis XIV to cure his gastric fistula (an intestinal disorder, of which the Sun King had many). Today's doctors might laugh at this attempted cure, but they would not refuse the medicine." -- Alexis Lichine and Samuel Perkins, _Guide to the Wines and Vineyards of France,_ Knopf, 1979, ISBN 0394418301
-- "Nasty, brutish, and long." -- TT (a wholesale wine merchant), in person, striving to describe flavors in a 1997 red wine at a blind tasting (May
2000).