A. J. Liebling Quotes

To buy very good wine nowadays requires only money. To serve it to your guests is a sign of fatigue.

I'm sure wine snobs look at me and think, how dare you.

Wine is wonderful stuff. But so many people are put off by the snobbery of it.

I never taste the wine first in restaurants, I just ask the waiter to pour.

You know what we say in the Hamptons: If you have to come out on a Friday afternoon or go back on a Sunday night, you're not rich enough to have a house there. So, you have to be able to come and go when you feel like it in the Hamptons.

Just like becoming an expert in wine, you learn by drinking it, the best you can afford.

Let's have some wine, go upstairs, and look at my money.

There's always a wine bully. The one person who did read the 'Wine Spectator,' who tells you what to drink and why the '97 is better than the '98. I want to punch the wine bully in the face. I want to make sure this generation of wine drinkers isn't elitist and snotty. I want it to be about family and bringing people together.

Christopher Plummer once told me that he never orders a wine without first confirming that the restaurant has a second bottle in case he loves it.

Well, you know, when you go into a restaurant, one of the scariest things is the wine list, so whenever I'm really feeling intimidated, I'll just pick a wine type, like a Chianti or Brunello or a Burgundy, and I'll pick a year that's missing and ask for that one.

My yachts were, I suppose, outstanding status symbols.

I'll tell you what I love. Sending back bottles of wine that aren't right in restaurants in France! Whoa! I love the French, but I do find their wine snobbery something unbearable.

Growing up, my dad drank a lot of wine, so I got a taste for, and learned how to enjoy it. He spoke a lot about flavors and differences in tastes of wine. Also, our manager, Rick Sales, is a big wine drinker; he goes to a lot of wine-tasting classes, and he's taught me about the qualities of wine.

Rich people know how to party, too.

My family was once invited to lunch at a chateau owned by a friend of a friend. As we drove our rental car up to the giant castle, my kids gasped and said, 'They must be rich!'

Being a billionaire is sort of passe.

Rich clubs, where money doesn't matter... such clubs don't interest me.

Tobacco is the opiate of the gentleman, the religion of the rich.

Abstraction and luxury are the guard dogs of the upper class.

The price you pay for being powerful and being rich is to be hated.

You can only know a good wine if you have first tasted a bad one.

The connoisseur does not drink wine but tastes its secrets

Exclusiveness is a characteristic of recent riches, high society, and the skunk.

For you cannot have gentility without paying for it.

No noble man ever hated good wine.