Robert Farrar Capon
Here’s a taste:

“How, without a pocketknife, do you pick a piece of privet blossom for a present to your second youngest daughter? How peel an orange to prove the goodness of creation? How amaze your friends with your ability to splice rope on a deserted beach? How open the clams you dig of an idle afternoon? (Even with a pocketknife, it isn’t easy; but it is something a gentleman should practice till he masters.) And lastly, how is the race of men to survive boring lectures, conferences, and committee meetings without a knife with which to whittle away the time? We give gold watches when men retire. To keep them sane, we should give them gold pocketknives when they start out.”

“Once wine is defined as an alcoholic beverage, however, sanity is hard to come by. As a nation, we drink the way we exercise: too little and too hard. Our typical gala dinner party is a disaster: three or four rounds of martinis followed by a dinner with two tiny glasses of middling Burgundy. The food is wolfed without discernment, the wine is ignored, and the convivialities come on so early that no one is up to the profundities when they arrive. How much better if we would forget, at least in our dinnering, the alcoholic idiocy—if we would provide our guests with long evenings of nothing but sound wine, good food, and fit company. Try it sometime. Sherry or Cinzano or Dubonnet–or, best of all, a good rainwater Madeira before dinner. No gin, no whiskey—and, in the name of all that’s holy, no vodka. More important still, no dips, no crackers, no de-appetizers at all. Only a mercifully brief apéritif, followed by a long and leisurely meal, with one wine or many, but with whatever wine there is dispensed with a lavish wrist: a minimum of half a bottle per person, if you are dealing with novices, or a whole bottle if you have real guests on your hands. Your party will reach an O Altitudo, an Ecce, quam bonum!, to which wine is the only road. Hard liquor is for strong souls after great dinners; it is the grape that brings ordinary mortals usque ad hilaritatem.”