Wine

 

“One should always be drunk. That's all that matters...but with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you chose. But get drunk.”

~ Charles Baudelaire

 “I cook with wine, sometimes I even add it to the food.”

~ W.C. Fields

 “As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans.”

~ Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

 One would expect Gourmet to have a lot to say on the subject of wine.  You could be forgiven for thinking that since the authors decided to go positively biblical from the onset. They pulled a a quote from St. Paul as encouragement to the embiber.

“Drink no longer water, but use a little wine for thy stomach’s sake...”

1 Timothy 5:23

Of course, the author cites this as an endorsement of enjoying wine while it appears from the biblical text that St. Paul meant it to be used as a remedy for polluted water. After bungling the quote, though, the Gourmet struck very modern stance in terms of wine pairings. They stated that the right wine for a meal is the one the drinker enjoys. Of course the next 17 pages are devoted to instructions on how you should choose the right wine for any particular meal!

Seventeen pages seems skimpy though. Twenty eight pages were devoted to mixed drinks and nearly fifty to Hors d'Ovres. Baffling that they'd spend so little time with wine when you think about it, but maybe that owes to the fact most people don't make wine. Then again they included recipes for smoked woodcock, potted bison, and woodchuck pie, I'd think a nice chardonnay wouldn't be too much to ask! Heck, if you're serving me woodchuck pie I'm going to need as much wine as I can get my hands on.