Ladies and gentlemen, we are proud to introduce our new posters…
If you’ve strolled past one of our shops in recent days, you may have noticed that we have some colourful and rather natty posters swinging merrily in our windows, emblazoned with unusual quotes. You may have asked yourself “What the blazes are Oddbins going on about now?” And to be honest that would probably be fair. So bear with us and we’ll try to explain…
We’ve hung the year up, drawn some lines on it and roughly quartered it (yes, we literally went medieval on 2012). We then designated each portion a theme. We started the year with “taste”. Rather than going down the obvious route of telling you that Sauvignon Blanc tastes like gooseberries and Gewürztraminer has hints of Turkish delight, we asked whether it matters what the flavours are as long as you like it and it perfectly complements your dinner. We concluded that maybe there’s room for both.
Then things got noisy when we moved on to “sound”. Here we explored what music goes best with our wines. We also carried out what we think was the world’s first synchronised music and wine matching tasting and discovered that “Alive and Kicking” by Simple Minds prefers Burgundy. Who knew?
Then we hit the third quarter and the theme of “words”, which coincided with it coming to our attention that the world had gone “loco” and that asinine restrictions were being placed on our freedom to use the English language. As you can imagine, this made us pretty angry, so we tooled up and fired off a few rounds of devastating words. After a bit of a Mexican standoff, we emerged from the written shootout victorious. We’re not really allowed to talk or write about it so we’ve holstered our weapons. But we’d have no problem drawing them again if another fight comes our way.
For now though we are just peacefully getting back on track with our “words” theme. If you would like to understand the reasons that lead us to choose this preposterous subject, please have a read of “A Brief Word…”. But be warned, the title is ironic. We’ve ignored Thomas Jefferson’s adage that;
“The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.”
Instead we’ve proceeded to write about seven times more than was completely necessary (kind of like JK Rowling did with the Harry Potter books), but hopefully you’ll find it entertaining.
Where were we? Words? Thomas Jefferson? Oh yes, quotes. For this quarter we’ve chosen six quotes roughly on the topic of drinks and drinking, and put them pride of place on our beautiful posters. But there were some classics that didn’t quite make the cut, including the following…
“There’s a beverage here.”
The Dude
“Drink a glass of wine after your soup, and you steal a ruble from the doctor.”
Russian Proverb
“Wine… is a food.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes
“If wine disappeared from human production, I believe there would be, in the health and intellect of the planet, a void, a deficiency far more terrible than all the excesses and deviations for which wine is made responsible. Is it not reasonable to suggest that people who never drink wine, whether naïve or doctrinaire, are fools or hypocrites…? A man who drinks only water has a secret to hide from his fellow-men.”
Baudelaire
“We want the finest wines available to humanity, we want them here, and we want them now.”
Withnail
If only we could’ve had more posters. Anyway, our questions to you are these… Which did we miss? What are your favourite wine, Champagne, beer or whisky quotes? No need to put your answers on a postcard, this isn’t Blue Peter, just pop it delicately into our comments section down at the bottom there. Thanks for reading, but we’ll love you more if you comment too. (TO)
This post was written while drinking: Gusbourne English Sparkling Rosé. However, even England’s sexiest fizz couldn’t stop us getting horrendously distracted by the genius of the Mo Farah Running Away From Things website. P.S. The introductory price on the Antoine Remy Champagne will only last until the end of October 2012.
The actual quote is “I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Amarone” but the film director changed it as he didn’t think the public would know what an Amarone was!
You’re quite right Stephen. We have to admit that we “sold out” by going for the film quote as we thought it would be more recognisable. As discussed here http://www.oddbins.com/wine/Wine_and_Words.html we knew this quote would stir up a debate. What is your favourite wine quote?
Love the posters. Following on from your wine and music matching, I’ve always liked this quote about beer by Frank Zappa… “You can’t be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline. It helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer.”
It’s great to find someone so on the ball.
This is awesome!
Is there anyway I can get hold of a copy of the portuguese proverb poster? I think it is inspired.
Thanks for your message Anthony. We’re super chuffed that you like the poster.
Our posters are all limited editions. We normally keep a few copies back to sell to customers, but unfortunately that particular poster has already sold out. However, we’ll have a rummage and see if we can find you one. Please email us your postal address to customer.services@oddbins.com and we’ll see what we can do. If we can find one, we may have to ask you to take a photo of it hung up in pride of place. If you want to ensure getting your hands on our posters in the future, please email us as soon as you see them.