On story · 2 min read

A tasting note worth re-reading

Most notes are written for nobody. The good ones are written for one specific reader: you, five years from now, holding the second bottle.

Open an old notebook and you will find the problem immediately. Blackcurrant, cedar, fine tannins, long finish. Perfectly true, entirely useless. You cannot tell from it whether you liked the wine, whether it was ready, or whether you should buy it again. It is a description with the person removed.

The fix is to write for a specific reader. Not a scoring panel, not an audience — yourself, later, standing in front of the second bottle and deciding whether tonight is the night. That reader needs surprisingly little, and almost none of it is vocabulary.

Write where the wine was on its curve. Not a score: a direction. Tight and still closed. Wide open, drink up. Fruit fading, acid stepping forward. Three words about direction are worth a paragraph of adjectives, because direction is the thing you cannot reconstruct later and the thing that decides when the next bottle gets opened.

Write one honest sentence about whether you liked it, and let it disagree with the label. Impressive but I did not enjoy it is a legitimate and extremely useful note. So is the reverse. The gap between what a wine deserves and what you actually want is the most personal information a cellar holds, and it is the only thing that makes recommendations mean anything.

Write the room. What you ate, who was at the table, why the bottle was opened at all. This feels like sentiment rather than data, and it is both — food and company genuinely change how a wine shows, and a note without them cannot explain why the same wine seemed better in October than in March.

Write one detail you would not find on a shelf-talker. The way it changed after an hour. The smell of the empty glass in the morning. The thing that made someone at the table stop talking.

That is the whole method: direction, honesty, the room, one detail. Four lines, written while the glass is still in front of you. Do it for a year and you will have something no database can generate — a record of your own taste, moving, with the wines that moved it.