I used to write tasting notes like I was trying to impress someone. “Notes of crushed slate, wet stone, and a whisper of white pepper.” Six months later, I’d look at that note and have no idea what the wine actually tasted like, or whether I liked it.
A tasting note has exactly one job: help future-you make a better decision. That’s it. Everything else is decoration.
Here’s the structure I actually use:
The wine. Name, producer, vintage, price. Boring, but this is the part people skip and then can’t find the bottle again.
One sentence, no jargon. Before anything else, write what you’d tell a friend: “Light, tart, a bit like biting into a green apple” beats “high acidity with notes of Granny Smith and citrus pith” every time, because you’ll actually remember what it means.
Structure, in plain terms. Rate three things on a simple scale (low / medium / high): acidity, tannin (skip this for whites), body. This takes ten seconds and tells you more about whether you’ll like a similar wine than a paragraph of poetic language.
Would I buy this again? Yes, no, or maybe with food. This single line is the most useful thing in the whole note, and it’s the one most tasting journals forget to ask directly.
Context, if it matters. What you ate with it, who you were with, the occasion. This isn’t sentimental filler, it’s data. If a wine tasted amazing on a beach in August, that might be the beach, not the wine.
What I’d skip: elaborate aroma lists that don’t mean anything to you personally, comparisons to fruits you’ve never actually smelled next to wine, and star ratings out of a system you didn’t design and don’t remember the logic of six months later.
The best tasting note isn’t the most sophisticated one. It’s the one that, read cold a year from now, tells you exactly whether to buy that bottle again.
If you’d rather have this structure ready-made instead of rebuilding it every time, The Confident Taster has this exact template built in, one hundred guided pages, so you just fill it in instead of reinventing the format each time you open a bottle.
