More than a thousand years later, wine snobs were still mostly mum when it came to the tastes and smells they savored in bottles. Samuel Pepys, a high-ranking officer in the British Royal Navy, needed only a paltry half sentence to describe a Château Haut-Brion he tried in 1663: It was, he wrote, “a good and most particular taste that I never met with.” (Fast-forward three hundred years, and Robert Parker’s review of a 1983 Haut-Brion would run on for six sentences.)
