Wine Toasts

Here are assorted quotes and toasts that celebrate or accompany the enjoyment of wine. Attributions are unknown unless otherwise indicated. Feel free to suggest more wine toasts using the link below. Cheers!

To contribute your wine toast suggestion, click here.

Wine is the most civilized thing in the world.
- Ernest Hemingway.

Wine is life.
- Petronius, Roman writer

Wine makes daily living easier, less hurried, with fewer tensions and more tolerance.
- Benjamin Franklin

Wine is the most healthful and most hygienic of beverages.
- Louis Pasteur

“What contemptible scoundrel stole the cork from my lunch?”
- W.C. Fields as Larson E. Whipsnade , You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man (1939)

And wine can of their wits the wise beguile, make the sage frolic, and the serious smile.
- Alexander Pope

The wine-cup is the little silver well, Where truth, if truth there be, doth dwell.
- William Shakespeare

If God forbade drinking, would He have made wine so good?
- Cardinal Richelieu

As you slide down the banister of life, may the splinters never point the wrong way.
- Unknown

Pour deep the rosy wine and drink a toast with me;
Here’s to three: Thee, wine and camaraderie!
- Unknown

Give me wine to wash me clean. From the weather-stains of care.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

I drink to your charm, your beauty and your brains -
Which gives you a rough idea of how hard up I am for a drink.
- Groucho Marx

Too much of a good thing is wonderful.
- Mae West

May you live as long as you want. And may you never want as long as you live.
- Unknown

May our wine brighten the mind and strengthen the resolution.
- Unknown

There is not the hundredth part of the wine consumed in this kingdom that there ought to be. Our foggy climate wants help.
- Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey

“Four be the things I am wiser to know: Idleness, sorrow, a friend, and a foe.
Four be the things I’d been better without: Love, curiosity, freckles, and doubt.”
-Dorothy Parker

“I would like to make a toast to lying, stealing, cheating and drinking. If you’re going to lie, lie for a friend. If you’re going to steal, steal a heart. If your going to cheat, cheat death. And if you’re going to drink, drink with me.”
- Anonymous

Work is the curse of the drinking class.
- Oscar Wilde

When I read about the evils of drinking, I gave up reading.
- Henny Youngman

Wine from long habit has become an indispensable for my health.
- Thomas Jefferson

I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me.
- Winston Churchill

Alcohol may be man’s worst enemy, but the Bible says love your enemy.
- Frank Sinatra

Cultural Toasts

English: Cheers!

Irish (Gaelic): Sláinte! (to your health)

French: Santé! (health)

Spanish: Salud! (health)

Italian: Salute (health)

Chinese: Ganbei! (dry your cup)

Dutch: Prost! (health)

German: Prost! (cheers)

Hebrew: Le’chaim! (to life)

Japanese: Kanpai! (dry your cup)

Welsh: Iechyd da! (health)

Russian: Vashe zdorovie! (to health)