Magnum Bottle Quotes

Some fifteen years earlier, in the mid-’90s, I’d somehow found myself at a dinner on the Upper East Side where a magnum of 1959 Château Margaux was opened for coupling with a main course of leg of lamb and where, once I’d tasted from the glass poured for me, I finally understood the logic behind spending thousands of dollars on a bottle of something to drink. I was no connoisseur. I couldn’t tell a berry note from a chocolate nose or discern the hint of spring flowers the dining guest beside me picked up, she said, developing as it sat in the glass. What I experienced was, perhaps, all the more remarkable for my having so virgin a palate. On my tongue, the wine disappeared almost magically into pure sensation, an absorbing congeries of rich and dusky hints—insinuations of bitterness tempered by the faintest echoes of something once sweet, now round and gathering—a developing flavor that revealed some ideal to which my every previous encounter with red wine appeared to have been pointing all along. And even more remarkable than this almost disincarnate sensation was the disincarnation itself, the effortless sublimation of liquid into pure savor, conveying me to the threshold of some essential idea of wine itself, a frictionless passage into the immaterial that felt, quite frankly, like something metaphysical

In Bordeaux, big bottles could range from magnum (the equivalent of two bottles) to Marie-Jeanne (three bottles) to double magnum (four bottles) to Jéroboam (six bottles) to Impériale (eight bottles). In Burgundy and Champagne, older Jéroboams were called Rehoboams, an Impériale was called a Methuselah, and even bigger bottles existed, including a Salmanazar (twelve bottles), a Balthazar (sixteen bottles), and a Nebuchadnezzar (twenty bottles).

I keep two magnums in my desk. One’s a gun, and I keep it loaded. The other’s a bottle, and it keeps me loaded.” —Tracer Bullet

Don’t worry, buddy. Mommy has an unloaded shotgun she can wave around and probably scare an intruder away with.” Sloane pulls the cork from the wine bottle. “And Auntie Sloane has a snub nose .357 magnum in her boot, which is loaded, so you really shouldn’t worry.

Your back door was locked. I checked the garage, too. All good. No crazy people.” Relieved, I sit at the table and scratch Mojo behind his ears. He rests his snout on my thigh and looks up at me, his furry eyebrows drawn together in a frown. “Don’t worry, buddy. Mommy has an unloaded shotgun she can wave around and probably scare an intruder away with.” Sloane pulls the cork from the wine bottle. “And Auntie Sloane has a snub nose .357 magnum in her boot, which is loaded, so you really shouldn’t worry.

Margaret had been right. I’d never admitted how angry it made me when she insulted soldiers like Rémy or when she insinuated that Bitsi’s mourning was a charade. I’d never admitted I’d been jealous of her glamorous life. I’d bottled up my resentment, and like a magnum of champagne that someone had shaken, sticky emotions came bursting out. In the moment, I’d wanted to punish her, and a moment was enough to ruin a life—Margaret’s and her daughter’s.