Wine has always accompanied man in his moments of joy and also in those of reflection and introspection, so it is normal that it has inspired many authors and writers, but also famous people from the worlds of music, cinema and entertainment who have dedicated their beautiful words to wine that have then become famous.
Poets and storytellers, thinkers and artists of every age have carved aphorisms and quotations of extraordinary expressive force. From Homer to Aristophanes, from Galileo Galilei to Giacomo Leopardi, from Manzoni to Hemingway, from Shakespeare to Baudelaire the world is full of hatreds and hymns to the nectar of the Gods.
Do a simple test... search on any web search engine for "wine quotes" or "wine quotes" and hundreds of results will appear with all kinds of expressions and aphorisms, from the most serious to the most jovial, heartbreaking words or witty phrases. There is something for all tastes and listing them in a single blog post would be difficult. For now, we have selected 4 very famous authors , whose rhymes have survived the centuries unscathed .
Coming soon other poets or writers who have sung wine as an element of joy, peace and culture.
HORACE
The complete sentence is Nunc est bibendum, nunc pede libero pulsanda tellus ('Now one must drink, now one must make the earth resound with one's free foot', that is, one can indulge in wild joy). Obviously Horace did not mean water, but wine. The beginning of the famous ode represents an emotional reaction of immense joy in front of the newly arrived announcement of Cleopatra's suicide (and consequently the end of the danger she represented for Rome) and immediately urges to celebrate the happy news with a glass in hand. As if to say that wine is not simply a pleasant drink. Wine is something more: not only does it quench thirst but it is also the drink of joy, of life, of celebration.
CATULLUS
An important part of the Liber Catulliano is made up of love poems dedicated to Lesbia, from which it is clear that the relationship had a happy beginning but that over time, it was overshadowed by the woman's numerous betrayals, alternating moments of joy with moments of unhappiness for the poet. Hate and love thus come to coexist, generating disorientation, madness and desperation. And this is where wine comes into play.
Boy if you pour an old wine,
fill their glasses with the most bitter,
as Postumia, our queen, wants
gets you drunker than a drunk grape.
And the water goes wherever it wants
to ruin the wine, far away,
among teetotalers: this is pure wine.
Yesterday Licinio, to pass the time
we had fun improvising
on my notebooks in delightful agreement.
By writing verses, we lost our soul…
to measure ourselves on this or that meter,
one after the other, in the joy of wine.
And I left there enchanted,
Licinius, by the grace of your spirit,
so upset that I forgot to have dinner,
so much so that you can't even close your eyes:
overcome by emotion I rebelled
inside the bed longing for day to come
to be able to talk to you, to be with you.
But now that I'm dead of exhaustion, my body
without any more strength he found peace on the bed,
I wrote these verses for you, my friend
so that you could understand my pain.
NERUDA
That of the Elementary Odes it is a poem dedicated to the things that surround man, even tiny things, but always essential to the point that, living with them, our gaze seems no longer to realize their irreplaceable value.
It took a 'total' poet like Pablo Neruda, always so attentive to the reasons of human life, to bring poetry back to the soul of things, almost giving them a new baptism. In this selection appear some inseparable companions of our cuisine: wine, «starred son of the earth»; bread, «repeated miracle / will of life»; tomato, «fresh and deep sun»; and also the onion, the artichoke, the chestnut, honey, oil… The poet exalts the uniqueness and beauty of each of them, and at the same time makes them live again in the melancholic light of his own childhood and adolescence, of the first, unforgettable encounter with things.
ODE TO WINE
Wine the color of the day,
night-colored wine,
wine with purple feet
oh topaz blood,
wine,
starry son
of the earth,
wine, smooth
like a golden sword,
soft
like a messy velvet,
wine with cork
and suspended,
loving,
marine,
you are never present in only one cup,
in a song, in a man,
you are choral, gregarious,
and, at the very least, exchangeable.
BAUDELAIRE
A special and intense relationship between wine and the cursed poet. As in his life, so also in his compositions, wine flows in abundance. In addition to being a pleasure, it also becomes one of the privileged ways to reach new poetic heights , able to read another reality, to console it and make it more pleasant. Wine is a means of escape and an instrument of inspiration and poetic creation.
Inside the very famous "The Flowers of Evil" there is an entire section dedicated to the nectar of Bacchus. It is a group of five poems entitled precisely "Wine" , all set in a gray and sad Paris, in which wine is always present, with different functions, depending on the circumstances. Wine is certainly a remedy and drunkenness is an ideal dimension for Baudelaire. But above all, unlike many other authors, from Homer to Manzoni, who have spoken of wine in their works, with Baudelaire for the first time wine becomes the protagonist, becomes a character with its own soul, becoming a common denominator for a population that seeks a remedy for the pain of living.
And so, agreeing with Baudelaire that wine is better in the body than in a cellar , let us enjoy with a glass in hand this homage from the cursed poet to wine as such:
THE SOUL OF WINE
Inside the bottles the soul of the wine sang one evening:
«Man, dear disinherited, here is a song full of
of light and brotherhood from this prison
of glass and from underneath the red sealing wax!
I know how much pain, how much sweat and how much sun
scorching serve, on the burning hill,
to bring me into the world and give me your soul;
but I will not be ungrateful or evil,
because I feel an immense joy when I go down
down the throat of a man exhausted by fatigue,
and her warm chest is a sweet tomb
where I feel better than in my cold cellars.
Do you hear the Sunday refrains echoing?
Do you hear how hope whispers in my throbbing breast?
You will see how you will exalt me and you will be happy
with elbows on the table and sleeves rolled up!
How I will light up the gaze of your kidnapped woman!
How will I give your child back his strength and his colors!
How will I be for that slender athlete of life
the oil that tempers the muscles of fighters!
I will fall into you, vegetable ambrosia,
precious grain scattered by the eternal Sower,
because poetry is born from our love
which like a rare flower will rise towards God!
Cheers!!
THE LASE