Sublime Inspiration 
Friday, August 1, 2008, 01:41 PM
Posted by President
This is the time of year when the hard work is over, we can stop muttering darkly at the sky and indulge some finer sentiments about wine. One enduring idea is the relationship between art, thought and wine, and wine’s apparent role in inspiring poets, artists, musicians and writers down through the ages. Following are a few ideas about the marvel that is wine, elegantly expressed by some thinkers and artists and ranging in time from about 2500 years ago, to the present:

Where there is no wine, love perishes, and everything else that is pleasant to man. Euripides (484 – 407 BC), Greek playwright.

Nothing more excellent or valuable than wine has ever been granted by the gods to man.
Plato, (427 – 347 BC), Greek philosopher.

Without good wine, spring is not spring for me. Hafiz, (1325 – 1389), Persian poet.

Wine…one sip of this will bathe the drooping spirits in delight beyond the bliss of dreams. John Milton (1608 – 1674), English poet.

Wine cheers the sad, revives the old, inspires the young, makes weariness forget his toil and… opens a new world, when this, the present, palls. Lord Byron, (1788 – 1824), English poet.

…good wine, well drunk, can lend majesty to the human spirit. M.F.K. Fisher (1908 – 1992), American writer.

Music is a psychological landscape, with all sorts of indefinable things. Wine is the same way. It has tastes that are very hard to define. When I drink a great wine, I get a sense of breadth – it’s like a chord sounding and echoing. Michael Tilson Thomas, Symphony Conductor.

My idea of heaven is to sit in a favourite restaurant with cheese and a glass of wine. Wendy Wasserstein, American playwright.

Some of these thoughts are perhaps a little overstated – poets after all are inclined to be lyrical, but there is a nub of wisdom and truth in all of them. So it is appropriate to give the last word to Pliny, Roman Scholar and Writer, who, around the time of Christ, coined the still famous aphorism in vino veritas – in wine, truth.

Robin Ransom
President, Matakana Winegrowers Inc.
robin@ransomwines.co.nz

Originally published in Mahurangi Matters, August 2008

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