The first paragraph translates as follows: 

It seems to me that the wine of Cornaro that I drank at M. Gibbon's has never been good. It is certainly not good at this moment. And I believe that it will never be good. De Saussure, Juge de Vin. 

Below this is a dissenting opinion:

I dare say that the wine of Cornaro that I tasted at M. Gibbon's will improve very much if kept for at least two years, and will be very pleasing. De Mourens.

Finally, a third opinion is appended: 

It will never be very pleasing. At the moment, it is hard and green. Deyverdun.

It is not easy to be certain quite what this "Vin de Cornaro" was, although my best guess is that it was a red wine from the Veneto, which might easily have been imported into Lausanne. The Cornaro family in Venice had been major wine shippers since the 16th century, with holdings in the hinterland of the city, as well as a thriving business importing strong red Cypriot wine. Assuming however that the wine sent to Lausanne was locally produced (perhaps some kind of Valpolicella), it has to be said that these wines can be unreliable even today, when advances in the technology of wine-making have done so much to eliminate outright disappointment (albeit often, it must be confessed, at the price of spreading mediocrity). In the late 18th century, with no limitations on yields, and with practices in the cellar less hygienic and vulnerable to freaks of temperature and to contamination, the red wines of the Veneto must have been a very chancy proposition for the purchaser.

But this little scrap of paper, a chance survivor of the great bonfire of history, suggests other things about wine-drinking in polite Lausannois circles at the end of the 18th century. In the first place, it reveals a continuity between then and now in the language of assessing wine — "hard" and "green" are terms still used today to evoke a wine suffering from insufficient fruit and unripe tannins. However, perhaps more striking is the discontinuity to which it points. Today, if you open a bottle of wine among knowledgeable friends you will certainly evaluate it, and you will very possibly disagree about it; but it would be unusual to record your various opinions on paper. It would seem strangely formal to do so. A certain formality, however, is precisely what this leaf of paper evokes. It is there in M. de Saussure's proud designation of "juge de vin" (presumably a public office relating to the city of Lausanne's vineyard holdings on the northern slopes of Lake Geneva), as well as in the orderly recording of these three, slightly discrepant verdicts, ranging from de Saussure's comprehensive condemnation, to de Mourens's view that they were drinking it too young, to Deyverdun's guarded hope for modest improvement ("never very pleasing" still leaves the door ajar for the wine to develop in the direction of at least some additional pleasure).