The Concise Guide to Wine & Blind Tasting Quotes

“When you uncork a bottle of mature fine wine, what you are drinking is the product of a particular culture and tradition, a particular soil, a particular climate, the weather in that year, and the love and labour of people who may since have died. The wine is still changing, still evolving, so much so that no two bottles can ever be quite the same. By now, the stuff has become incredibly complex, almost ethereal. Without seeking to blaspheme, it has become something like the smell and taste of God. Do you drink it alone? Never. The better a bottle, the more you want to share it with others ... and that is the other incredible thing about wine, that it brings people together, makes them share with one another, laugh with one another, fall in love with one another and with the world around them.”
― Neel Burton, The Concise Guide to Wine and Blind Tasting

“Wine is one of the most complex of all beverages: the fruit of a soil, climate, and vintage, digested by a fungus through a process guided by the culture, vision, and skill of an individual man or woman.”
― Neel Burton, The Concise Guide to Wine and Blind Tasting

“Drinking wine is like using magic: there's always a price to pay.”
― Neel Burton, The Concise Guide to Wine & Blind Tasting

“While conversion of sugars to ethanol is the predominant reaction, it is only one of potentially thousands of biochemical reactions taking place during fermentation. As a result, wine contains trace amounts of a large number of organic acids, esters, sugars, alcohols, and other molecules. Wine is, in fact, one of the most complex of all beverages: the fruit of a soil, climate, and vintage, digested by a fungus through a process guided by the culture, vision, and skill of an individual man or woman.”
― Neel Burton, The Concise Guide to Wine and Blind Tasting

“When you uncork a bottle of mature fine wine, what you are drinking is the product of a particular culture and tradition, a particular soil, a particular climate, the weather in that year, and the love and labour of people who may since have died. The wine is still changing, still evolving, so much so that no two bottles can ever be quite the same. By now, the stuff has become incred- ibly complex, almost ethereal. Without seeking to blaspheme, it has become something like the smell and taste of God.”
― Neel Burton, The Concise Guide to Wine and Blind Tasting

“In refining their senses and aesthetic judgement, blind tasters become much more conscious of the richness not only of wine but also of other potentially complex beverages such as tea, coffee, and spirits, and, by extension, the flavours in food, the scents in the air, and the play of light in the world. For life is consciousness, and consciousness is life.”
― Neel Burton, The Concise Guide to Wine and Blind Tasting

“Next time you drink a glass of champagne, remember that it is essentially a faulty wine from an unpromising place, made great by the genius of man.”
― Neel Burton, The Concise Guide to Wine & Blind Tasting

“Some people you invite them and they barely drink anything at all, others and you don't know where it all went, but the best guests are those that drink only slightly less than you.”
― Neel Burton, The Concise Guide to Wine & Blind Tasting

“For me, the love of fine wine is as different from the love of alcohol as the love of fireworks from the love of dynamite.”
― Neel Burton, The Concise Guide to Wine & Blind Tasting

“Wine is like philosophy, or fiction: it gives you distance over the world.”
― Neel Burton, The Concise Guide to Wine & Blind Tasting