Wine Code Breaker #211

One from the archives…Samuel Pepys is reported to be the pioneer of the modern tasting note. In 1663 he described a recent tasting, for him at least, as follows “Drank a sort of French wine, called Ho Bryan, that hath a good and most particular taste that ever I met with”. The wine was in fact French and it was Chateau Haut-Brion, regarded as the first house to label their wine as their own. Tasting notes have evolved since these times and given the era, I started to think how the most famous of bards, Shakespeare, who had passed 50 years earlier, would have written a musing of a wine tasted during his drafting of an upcoming play. Given the English infatuation for Bordeaux, I thought a similarly styled wine would be best to test this theory.

When I did pour the Mayer Cabernet Sauvignon, how light it appeared.  The year fourteen passed two thousand; Yarra Valley whence the grapes were sourced.   A nose I know a lady in Venice would have walked barefoot to for a smell of the berries and stalk.  Eternity was on my lips and nose, bliss was on my brow bent; dark berries, spice and herbs do blend.  Tobacco and cedar, elegantly they danced.  None of the parts so poor.  Tannins and acid, they were in the very wrath of love, and they will together; clubs could not part them.  A palate was but a long race to heaven.  This momentary joy breeds months of pain.  Another glass quells the cold disdain.  A tragedy it isn’t.

The 2022, as pictured, elicited similar thoughts and as I did not have a picture of the 2014, I am publishing to the site as a combined note.

Enjoy both!