Keeping a Wine Tasting Journal

If you enjoy wine, you enjoy wine tasting. It is a good way to experience new vintages and really develop your palette. Over time, you can really nail down the wine you enjoy and eliminate those that simply do not pass muster. Keeping a wine tasting journal is the way to do this.

The world of wine is unique in that it tries to apply objective standards to the subjective act of tasting. For years, wines were evaluated on whether they met these objective standards and you were expected to approve of them accordingly regardless of whether you actually liked the taste or not.

Fortunately, those days are pretty much past. The approach now is two fold. You want to develop your own taste and preferences while also narrowing down the vintages you prefer. Basically, you improve your ability to evaluate wines while also recognizing which wines are better than others per your taste. To do this, you need to keep a wine tasting journal.

A wine tasting journal is pretty much what it sounds like. It is a journal that you record your impressions of a wine in. Quality wine journals usually provide you two pages that open vertically. On the top page, you paste the label of the bottle you tasted so you can reference it in the future. On the lower page, you record your impressions of the wine in question. The page should include a lined area for you to write general impressions in as well as questions to remind you to jot down important information.

Your wine journal should be sacred to you. In a hustle and bustle world where it is hard to remember what you had for lunch yesterday, a wine journal will be a running record of the evolution of your tastes. When you are in a rush and need to pick up a bottle for a dinner or party or the like, you can flip open your journal and find a vintage that is appropriate for both the company and the food being served. This alone eliminates the risk of bringing a bottle of something that tastes closer to vinegar than a vibrant rose.

Wine is a world unto its own. Unlike most food, it is rife with variations that range from the subtle to the extreme. Identifying the vintages you prefer versus those you wish to avoid is a matter of taste, tastings and time. A wine journal is an effective way to make sure you keep an effective record of your conclusions.

By: Richard Chapo

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