Wine 101: The Notebook

Wednesdays on the BottleBlog will feature an education session on wine, beer or spirits. Today, Shannon Spare shares how she keeps track of her wine and beer.

Probably the most valuable tool I have, when it comes to my personal wine education journey, is my handy-dandy notebook. Every time I bring home a new wine to enjoy, I bust out my little book.

You may find a system that works better for you, but here's what I find works great for me. My notebook is from the Staples Arc brand. It has these little discs that hold the pages together so that they're easily removed. (A 3-ring notebook would serve the same purpose.) Pretty "Tasting Notes" books are widely available for sale, but most of them are hard-bound. I like being able to remove the pages and shuffle them around. Right now I have three dividers: Reds, Whites and "Other," where I put roses, sparkling wines and dessert wines. Within the dividers I have the wines organized alphabetically by winery. In the future, if I want to compare all the Cabernet Sauvignons I've tasted, I will have the ability to remove the pages and arrange them by varietal. It's nice to have the ability to pop in a page where it fits, and not have to flip through 30 wines to find the one I'm looking for.

When I taste wines, on one side of the page I always consistently make notes on Color, Aroma and Taste (these are pretty standard) as well as anything else I notice about the wine on the bottom. On the other side, if I can get the label off the bottle easily, I tape it there.

Color has always been easiest to note for me, as a beginner. Use words that you are familiar with. I've noted my reds as brick, mahogany, burnt orange, cranberry, ruby, rusty red and plum purple, among others. Whites have been golden straw, pale yellow, almost white, and I even described the color of one white as "raw egg white." Whatever you see is right.

Aroma, on the flip side, has always been the most difficult. Many of the wines I drink still mostly smell like wine to me, with varying scents that I can differentiate from one another but not identify. However, I'm pretty sure I have "oak" down and can tell fairly easily if a wine was aged with oak. There are thousands of descriptors for wine. Whites can be minerally, buttery, grassy or numerous kinds of citrusy: lemon, lime, grapefruit, orange etc. Red aroma descriptors include any kind of berry, earth, plum, spice, licorice, and a variety of words that still turn my head: barnyard, lead pencil shavings, tar, even gasoline!

Then I sip it and rate the taste. Aroma and taste may be totally different; One wine I tasted I described as smelling "smoky," but when I tasted it I got nothing but fruit. You may want to make note of how tannic (astringent, mouth drying) the wine is, or how acidic. You also might write down notes about the body of the wine. Is it thin, like water? Or thicker, like milk?

I also make notes of anything else I happen to notice about the wine. One time, the cork of my wine was "off" when I opened it, and I wrote "Cork was weird. Gooey before I opened it, seemed too wet and had wine soaked all through the sides. I thought this might be a bad sign it was corked but the wine tasted okay." Another wine had a LOT of sediment at the bottom - more than I'd ever seen before, so I jotted that down so I'd remember,

This really helps sort out the wines for me. At the very least, it's helping me identify what I like, rather than picking bottles blindly, because when you're learning about wine, they all do tend to blend together unless you have a way to keep track. It'll also open your horizons. My wine notebook has helped me go from "I don't like white wine," to "I love Gruner Veltliner!"

And lately, since I've started to diverge into the world of beer, I've devoted a few pages in the back of my notebook for beers I've tastes. I've only done a few, but so far I think I'm getting somewhere in terms of my personal likes (Porters) and dislikes (Stouts).

Let me know if you keep a wine notebook... what's it like? What have you learned from it? Leave a comment below!