It needs only a good bottle of wine for a roast chicken to be transformed into a banquet.

I know never to take a wine for granted. Drawing a cork is like attendance at a concert or at a play that one knows well, when there is all the uncertainty of no two performances ever being quite the same. That is why the French say, 'There are no good wines, only good bottles.'

I made a mental note to watch which bottle became empty soonest, sometimes a more telling evaluation system than any other.

One thing I don't think that we have enough of in wine writing is the use of cause and effect. Whatever wine tastes like, whatever you're going to do with it, it is as it is for a reason.

Inevitably I came to associate any wine I met with a specific place and a particular slant of history. I learned to perceive more than could be deduced from an analysis of the physical elements in the glass. For me, an important part of the pleasure of wine is its reflection of the total environment that produced it. If I find in a wine no hint of where it was grown, no mark of the summer when the fruit ripened, and no indication of the usages common among those who made it, I am frustrated and disappointed. Because that is what a good, honest wine should offer.

A restaurant wine list is praised and given awards for reasons that have little to do with its real purpose, as if it existed only to be admired passively, like a stamp collection. A wine list is good only when it functions well in tandem with a menu.

Writing is a conversation, to me. The best kind. You can't get interrupted.