I know Anne Fadiman, and she’s not stupid, blinkered, or chauvinistic. Yet how impenetrable English-speakers can sometimes be to the fact that other languages exist, and count as means of communication and record! See her New Yorker piece on not liking wine, which mentions by-the-by that
Haut-Brion is generally considered the first wine ever to receive a review—by the diarist Samuel Pepys, who visited London’s Royall Oak Tavern, on April 10, 1663, and, as he noted in his journal, “here drank a sort of French wine, called Ho Bryan, that hath a good and most particular taste that I never met with.” Haut-Brion was drunk by Dryden, Swift, Defoe, and Locke. When Thomas Jefferson was the American minister to France, he bought six cases of Haut-Brion and sent them back to Monticello.
“Generally considered” by people whose world is bounded by the approximately five hundred years of the English language that’s easy going for non-philologists, I guess. Isn’t it a pity that over the four thousand or so years that wine drinking has been going on, none of the Greeks, Romans, Italians, French, Spanish, Portuguese, etc., ever conceived of the idea of writing down their thoughts about a particular vintage? Or does something count as a “wine review” only if it’s written for English-speakers? Good thing that Pepys, Dryden, Swift, Defoe, Locke and Jefferson were on the job, otherwise the world would never have known of Ho Brian. And it’s really a pity, then, that Odysseus’s words were wasted, inasmuch as he spoke them in a remote provincial palaver unknown to humanity:
With me I had a goat-skin of the dark, sweet wine, which Maro, son of Euanthes, had given me, the priest of Apollo, the god who used to watch over Ismarus. And he had given it me because we had protected him with his child and wife out of reverence; for he dwelt in a wooded grove of Phoebus Apollo. And he gave me splendid gifts: of well-wrought gold he gave me seven talents, and he gave me a mixing-bowl all of silver; and besides these, wine, wherewith he filled twelve jars in all, wine sweet and unmixed, a drink divine. Not one of his slaves nor of the maids in his halls knew thereof, but himself and his dear wife, and one house-dame only. And as often as they drank that honey-sweet red wine he would fill one cup and pour it into twenty measures of water, and a smell would rise from the mixing-bowl marvellously sweet; then verily would one not choose to hold back. (Odyssey, book 9, tr. Murray)
And likewise the consumer report filed by Archilochus:
I know how to strike up the fine dithyrambic song of Dionysos,
when I’m blitzed with wine
(fragment 120)
For locals only?