When I attend some wine tasting, nine times out 10, I see people who take notes with pen & paper in the old manner. Nothing wrong, although it appears a bit weird to me in a tech era like this (I use my iPad, to say, but it’s just because I’m lazy and want to work on a file when I have to write an article about the wines).

However, when it comes to ordinary people, such as simple wine lovers, I’ve noticed that even plenty of them use pen&paper, or better: an actual wine-tasting journal.

I’ve investigated many of them and found that, except for graphic customizations, almost all replicate the typical tasting sheet. The ones that producers, winemakers, or sommeliers also use (but theirs are not as pretty as those in wine-tasting notebooks).

Those sheets are great for the record of a lot of wines, vivisecting them as if they were lab rats and you were a buyer who had to decide how many dozen of crates to buy. Color, intensity, smell, flavors, alcohol, tannins, aftertaste, length… you got it.

They are also great for MW and WSET students, wine collectors, wine critics, etc. Wine pros, I mean.

How fun is this approach? Well, I’m afraid not too much, although in a professional context is OK. But what if the context is more hedonistic? When the focus is only on the wine, there is usually no room or time for everything else. Not for how that wine makes us feel, what it reminds us, or for some unconventional ideas associations - a color, a place. Music.

Wine it’s not just color-flavors-taste. It’s much more, and when we don’t have enough time for that, we lose a significant part of the experience, in my opinion. Maybe the best one.

To help those of us who are getting to be tired of the “classic” approach to wine tasting (professional, scientific, technical, you name it), now there is a specific wine-tasting journal (and yes, I collaborated to make it)*. You find it here.

Mind you: it focuses more on the wine taster than the wine tasting! So, it likely doesn’t suit wine tastings with many wines or in a professional context. But it’s great because it frees you from any convention.

If you aren’t afraid to break all the rules of wine tasting, this notebook is just for you.

*(Thank you, Yanet Del Carmen de Diego for your support!)