He had very little of what musicians call an ear; his smell was hardly more delicate.

I have seen him stare about, quite unconscious of the cause, when his whole company betrayed their uneasiness at the approach of an overkept haunch of venison; and neither by the nose nor the palate could he distinguish corked wine from sound.

He could never tell Madeira from sherry,--nay, an Oriental friend having sent him a butt of _sheeraz_, when he remembered the circumstance some time afterwards and called for a bottle to have Sir John Malcolm's opinion of its quality, it turned out that his butler, mistaking the label, had already served up half the bin as _sherry_.
Port he considered as physic ...

in truth he liked no wines except sparkling champagne and claret; but even as to the last he was no connoisseur, and sincerely preferred a tumbler of whisky-toddy to the most precious 'liquid-ruby' that ever flowed in the cup of a prince."[15] However, Scott's eye was very keen:--"_It was commonly him_," as his little son once said, "_that saw the hare sitting_." And his perception of colour was very delicate as well as his mere sight.

As Mr.Ruskin has pointed out, his landscape painting is almost all done by the lucid use of colour.