Drew Bledsoe Quotes

The French make the best wine.

To work a vineyard, you need a lot of guts to do that. To go out there and work all year, you almost feel that these people talk to the grapes. Wine is a lifestyle, and you can talk about it for ages. It's a passion, but it's not something I can do on a daily basis.

The reality is that I'm making better wine than I thought I would. The whole process is simple but beautiful.

My unrealized ambition is to tend my vines, produce wine, and work like an artisan. I dream of rediscovering the old traditions and customs of wine growing, not necessarily to deny the technology which we have today, but to harness it and work in harmony with nature.

At Andretti Winery, I'm not the winemaker.

I started looking all over for vineyard sites. I studied the conditions that make the best pinots. In the New World, you have to find the great pieces of land. Cool climate counts, but distinctive soil matters more than anything.

I'm actually surprised how technical a lot of commercial wine production is. Things are done very much from an industrial chemistry point of view at certain price points, but that's not the impression you get with wine.

Winemakers have to adapt to what they're given by nature: the vines, the fruit, the soil and the weather.

Walla Walla is where I make wine, with Eric Dunham. He and I partnered up on a small project for me. We make pretty good cabernet and syrah.

I believe that the responsibility of the winemaker is to take that fruit and get it into the bottle as the most natural and purest expression of that vineyard, of the grape varietal or blend, and of the vintage.

Fairly early in my career, I had a passion for wine just as a consumer, and I started to learn about the whole process, starting with a piece of raw ground, and ending up with a work of art in a bottle.

A lot of hard work goes into making a great wine. It requires that same type of dedication and discipline that goes into getting to the Super Bowl as an NFL player.

If you want to make a great wine that can stand the test of time, then you must put the time and the work into it.

Today's winemakers still worry about quality.

So I got into growing grapes, not realizing that there was a heck of a lot more to it than meets the eye.

What is wine? It is the grape present in another form; its essence is there, though the fruit which produced it grew thousands of miles away, and perished years ago. So the object of many a tender thought may be spiritually present, in defiance of space - and fond recollections cherished in defiance of time.

You can be drinking the wine today, but picking the grapes tomorrow.

To take wine into our mouths is to savor a droplet of the river of human history.

The wine business is intense. It's not just bottle it and sell it. It's really a process.

I can no more think of my own life without thinking of wine and wines and where they grew for me and why I drank them when I did and why I picked the grapes and where I opened the oldest procurable bottles, and all that, than I can remember living before I breathed.

Wine has been with civilized man from the beginning.

If I'd been a housemaid I'd have been the best in Australia - I couldn't help it. It's got to be perfection for me.

I've always enjoyed drinking wine, ever since I was in college. My appreciation really took off when I began to visit Napa. I was toying with an idea of making wine in Napa, but it's prohibitively expensive, and the competition is fierce.

Back in 1990, there were fewer than 20 wineries in and around Paso Robles, a farming community midway between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Most of the wines produced there were rustic, highly tannic and alcoholic, with little charm or finesse.

Everything I do and everything Pixar does is based on a simple rule: Quality is the best business plan, period.