Quotes About California Wine

“California and Italy are about the same size. Roughly speaking, California contains about 150,000 square miles, Italy about 120,000 square miles. They are not dissimilar in physical characteristics. They extend over a long distance from north to south, and each has an extensive coastline. Each is destitute of coal mines. Each produces large quantities of wheat. Each produces citrus and other fruits, olives, wine, and raisins. The climate is about the same, although California's is superior. They are in about the same zone. Rome lies in about the same latitude as San Francisco. Our state is one of the richest and most fertile of all the United States. Yet suppose that California were as populous as Italy-someday it will be. Suppose it had a population of millions. Could California, even with its vast resources, support an army of a quarter of a million men as Italy does? She could do it only as Italy does, by grinding the people into the dust with oppressive taxation.”

— Jerome Hart

“By planting rye I am creating carbon sinks in my backyard, expanding my role in the carbon cycle, launching my own backyard campaign to offset global warming. My emissions, after all, reflect a rural but very comfortable life in which I enjoy goods that travel great distances - clementines from Spain, wine from California - and on the occasional holiday I fly south, seeking warmer places. Will planting rye in the shoulder seasons be enough to make a difference? Certainly not, but it is a gesture, a way to frame the question and provide a benchmark to judge the extent of my complicity.”

— Amy Seidl

“What's important in a cellar is having wines that have a broad range of drinkability, which California Cabernet does. Wines with a broad range of drinkability give you a lot of flexibility; they are the sort of wines that make me feel secure. I think of my wine cellar as security - if the apocalypse comes, I can just go down to the cellar.”

— Robert M. Parker, Jr.

“I can be super reclusive and hermetic, and then I can be in California and host dinner parties and drink wine. It's all me.”

— Lia Ices

“Everything is just better in California - the wine, the food, fruits and vegetables, the comforts of living. Even the instrumentalists are generous and curious. Everything is wonderful.”

— Beth Anderson

“But I have never had the privilege of unhappiness in Happy Valley. California is about the good life. So a bad life there seems so much worse than a bad life anywhere else. Quality is an obsession there-good food, good wine, good movies, music, weather, cars. Those sound like the right things to shoot for, but the never-ending quality quest is a lot of pressure when you're uncertain and disorganized and, not least, broker than broke. Some afternoons a person just wants to rent Die Hard, close the curtains, and have Cheerios for lunch.”

— Sarah Vowell

“He was California from the tips of his port wine loafers to the buttoned and tieless brown and yellow checked shirt inside his rough cream sports jacket.”

— Raymond Chandler

“The premise of Nossiter in 'Mondovino' would have been a lot more accurate when I started writing about wine in 1978 than when the movie was made in 2003. When I started, I was enormously critical of California wines, and I thought the entire wine industry was on a real slippery slope.”

— Robert M. Parker, Jr.

“Really, truly, try to figure out what your palate is all about. If you've determined that you don't like dirty old stinky wine - old-world flavors - you probably like new-world fruit bombs. Stick to Shirazes and California Cabernets or Zinfandels.”

— Gary Vaynerchuk

“I tell people that I represent the district with a third of the California coast, the biggest trees in the world, some of the best wine grapes in the world, and about 60 percent of the marijuana produced in America.”

— Jared Huffman

“My brother Julio and I worked to improve the quality of wines from California and to put fine wine on American dinner tables at a price people could afford”

— Ernest Gallo

“From a wine critic's perspective, there are far too many innocuous, over-oaked, over-acidified, or over-cropped wines emerging from California. While those sins would not be a problem if the wines sold for under $20, many are in fact $75-$150. That's appalling.”

— Robert M. Parker, Jr.

“In the luxuriance of a bowl of grapes set out in ritual display, in a bottle of wine, the soil and sunshine of California reached millions for whom that distant place would henceforth be envisioned as a sun-graced land resplendent with the goodness of the fruitful earth.”

— Kevin Starr

“As one California winemaker said, "We release no wine before the bank tells us that its ready."”

— Kevin Zraly

“There's great wine from Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Chile and, of course, California. But there's nothing like a really great French wine, they're so well balanced. The better the wine, the less you feel the effects I think.”

— Ridley Scott