Let us have wine and woman, mirth and laughter, Sermons and soda water the day after. Man, being reasonable, must get drunk; The best of life is but intoxication: Glory, the grape, love, gold, in these are sunk The hopes of all men, and of every nation; Without their sap, how branchless were the trunk Of life's strange tree, so fruitful on occasion: But to return--Get very drunk; and when You wake with head-ache, you shall see what then.
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.
Think of the wonders uncorked by wine! It opens secrets, gives heart to our hopes, pushes the cowardly into battle, lifts the load from anxious minds, and evokes talents. Thanks to the bottle's prompting no one is lost for words, no one who's cramped by poverty fails to find release.
Mr. Tulkinghorn, sitting in the twilight by the open window, enjoys his wine. As if it whispered to him of its fifty years of silence and seclusion, it shuts him up the closer. More impenetrable than ever, he sits, and drinks, and mellows as it were in secrecy, pondering at that twilight hour on all the mysteries he knows.
I suspect states are going to realize there's money to be made, and they'll start to change laws so people can distil to sell. It happened with wine, it happened with beer.
now
I bring full-flavoured wine out of a barrel found
Where seven Ephesian topers slept and never knew
When Alexander's empire passed, they slept so sound.
Wine has a drastic, an astringent taste. I cannot help wincing as I drink. Ascent of flowers, radiance and heat, are distilled here to a fiery, yellow liquid. Just behind my shoulder-blades some dry thing, wide-eyed, gently closes, gradually lulls itself to sleep. This is rapture. This is relief.
O madness to think use of strongest wines And strongest drinks our chief support of health, When God with these forbidden made choice to rear His mighty champion, strong above compare, Whose drink was only from the liquid brook.