Wine Diary: How to Remember the Wines You Drink
A wine diary is somewhere you record which wines you've drunk and what you thought of them. The point isn't to sound like a sommelier – it's that next time you're standing in the shop, you actually remember which wine it was that you liked. Most of us forget a wine within a few weeks, and with it whatever we learned from it.
What a wine diary is actually good for
It sounds like a hobby for the especially keen, but the benefits are fairly concrete.
You stop buying the same disappointment twice. Labels are hard to tell apart. Standing in front of the shelf six months later, it's easy to reach for the same bottle again for exactly the reason you did last time: it looked familiar.
You start seeing patterns. After twenty or thirty entries something emerges that's hard to get at any other way. Perhaps you consistently like wines with high acidity. Perhaps most of your top scores come from the same two regions, or the €15–25 band gives you as much pleasure as twice that.
You drink your wines in time. If you cellar anything, this is the important one. A forgotten bottle rarely improves for being forgotten, and it's surprisingly easy to miss a drinking window by several years.
What to record
Short beats nothing. Start with the first four fields and add more when it feels natural.
| Field | Why |
|---|---|
| Wine and producer | Obvious, but write the full name. Two wines from the same producer can be completely different. |
| Vintage | Without it the entry is nearly useless. The same wine varies from year to year. |
| Score | A simple scale you stick to. Three levels goes a long way. |
| One sentence on the taste | Your own words. "Tasted of cherries and a bit of liquorice" is more useful to you than a correct but borrowed phrase. |
| Date | Lets you see how your palate shifts over time. |
| Price and where you bought it | Tells you whether it was worth the money, and whether you can find it again. |
| What you ate with it | Half the impression comes from the food. Without it the context is missing. |
| Grape and region | This is where the patterns show up once you've built up some entries. |
How to write an entry you'll actually use
There are entire tasting systems with prescribed vocabularies. They're excellent if you're training as a sommelier and largely unnecessary otherwise.
A reasonable way to start: smell it, taste it, and write down the first thing you think. Then a line about the body – did it feel light or heavy in the mouth? And finally the part that actually matters: would you buy it again?
That last question is the most underrated. A wine can be technically well made without you wanting to drink it, and the other way round.
If you'd like a few more words to hang your impressions on, the common ones are in our wine glossary.
Paper or app?
A notebook works and costs nothing. The drawback only shows up later: you can't search it. After a hundred entries, "what was that Spanish wine I liked in the spring" becomes practically unanswerable, and you rarely have the notebook with you in the shop.
A spreadsheet solves the searching but is awkward to fill in on a phone, which is exactly where you are when the wine is in front of you.
There's no point overstating the difference. The wine diary that works is the one you actually use, and a well-kept notebook beats an app you open twice.
Keeping a wine diary in Macave
Macave is built for this. You log the wines in your collection with vintage, region and price, then add tasting notes when you open a bottle.
Because the notes sit alongside the collection itself, you see both what you've drunk and what's still lying down. That makes it easier to keep track of which wines can be aged and which should be drunk now.
The account is free, with no limit on how many wines or notes you can add.
Create an account and start with the next bottle you open.
If you'd also like to ask your collection questions in plain language – what suits Thursday's dinner, what should be drunk before Christmas – that's in Macave Premium.
Common questions
What is a wine diary?
A wine diary is a set of notes about wines you've drunk, covering the wine, the vintage, your score and what you thought of the taste. It can be kept on paper, in a spreadsheet or in an app.
Do you need to know a lot about wine to keep one?
No. Your own words work better than borrowed jargon, because the entry is written for you. A score and one sentence about the taste is enough to make it useful.
What should you write in a wine diary?
Start with the wine, the vintage, a score and one sentence on the taste. After that, add the date, price, where you bought it, the grape, the region and what you ate with it.
Is an app better than a notebook?
An app is searchable and comes with you to the shop, which starts to matter once you have a lot of entries. But a notebook you actually use is better than an app you never open.
Does Macave cost anything?
No. Logging wines and keeping tasting notes is free, with no limit on numbers. Macave Premium is an add-on that lets you ask questions about your collection in plain language.