Wise on wine: Writers wax rhapsodic on our favorite beverage

Writerly wit, wisdom and wine go together like Comte cheese and Meursault. To, er, wit:

“You Americans have the loveliest of wines, you know, but you don’t even realize it.” — H.G. Wells

“His lips drink water, but his heart drinks wine.” — e.e. cummings (left)

“Champagne is one of the elegant extras of life.”  — Charles Dickens

“God loves fermentation just as dearly as He loves vegetation.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Wine, n. Fermented grape-juice known to the Women’s Christian Temperance Union as ‘liquor’, sometimes ‘rum’.  Wine, Madame, is God’s next best gift to man.”  — Ambrose Bierce, “The Devil’s Dictionary,” 1911