You have learned to look, smell and taste systematically. You have calibrated your palate and practised seeing through your own biases during blind tasting. But what is the use of it all if the impression evaporates the moment the glass is empty? This is where the tasting note comes in.
This is the eighth part of Tasting Analysis Like a Professional. We look at how you write notes that can actually be used again, how the common point systems are put together, and not least how you make your notes comparable over time, so they become a tool and not just a diary.
What You Will Learn
- How to write structured tasting notes you can return to and trust
- How the common point systems work, and what they are really trying to capture
- How to make your notes comparable from glass to glass and from session to session
- Why discipline in the form of the note is what separates memory from data
Why Notes Pay Off
Tasting is sensory analysis, and sensory analysis is about evoking, measuring, analysing and interpreting the reactions our senses give us. The last link, the interpretation, requires that the impression is captured. A note is your way of turning a fleeting sensory experience into something you can return to and compare with.
Think about how little actually gets through. During normal breathing only a small part of the air reaches the olfactory receptors, and even when you actively sniff, the proportion only rises to around a fifth. That means a large part of the wine's aroma passes by unnoticed. The amount of information you actually register in a glass is valuable precisely because it is limited. Letting it disappear again is a waste.
The note solves two things at once. It forces you to put things into words, which in itself sharpens your attention, and it creates a trace you can calibrate against later. A trained tasting panel is expected to produce data that are accurate, repeatable, sensitive and reproducible. Those are exactly the same four qualities you should strive for in your own notes, and they are not achieved by memory alone.
A Usable Note Structure
A good note follows the same order every time, because structure is what makes data comparable. The natural framework is the systematic method you already know from the rest of the series: sight, smell, taste, conclusion. Treat the note as filling in the same fields, wine after wine.
Sight
Note clarity, intensity and colour. Remember that the resolution of sight rests on the eye's cones reacting to red, blue and green, and that intermediate colours arise from different stimulation of these. When you describe a hue as garnet or amber, you are describing a blend, not a pure tone. Be concrete about the rim of the wine, where the colour development is often read most clearly.
Smell
Here a note serves you particularly well, because the human sense of smell can recognise in the region of ten thousand separate aromas, but only via a limited number of receptor proteins that bind volatile compounds. So you recognise patterns, not molecules. Note intensity, and then group the aromas into families, as we covered in the part on smell. Write down whether you sense terpene character, the kind found in aromatic varieties such as Gewürztraminer, Muscat and Riesling, or ester-borne, sweetish notes formed during fermentation and maturation.
Taste
Describe the structure step by step: the basic tastes (sweet, salty, sour, bitter, umami), the level and character of the acidity, the amount and texture of the tannins, as well as body and finish. Tie the observations to what lies behind them. Acidity is decisive for the wine's life: too much makes it sharp, too little makes it flat and dull. Tannin is phenolic compounds that give structure, grip and ageing potential. When you note these, you are at the same time noting the wine's building blocks.
Conclusion
Gather the impression: balance, complexity, finish and an overall assessment. This is where the score belongs, if you use one.
A practical rule: always write the note during the tasting itself, not afterwards. Memory rewrites, and a note reconstructed an hour later has lost precisely the accuracy that made it worth writing.
The Point Systems
A point system is an attempt to boil a multidimensional impression down to a single number. It is useful for ranking and communicating, but it also hides information, and it is worth understanding both sides.
Affective methods measure preference and acceptance. Among these are paired preference, preference ranking and hedonic tests. They basically ask: do you like it, and how much. It is a legitimate and well-defined approach, but it is subjective by nature and says more about the judge than about the wine.
Descriptive methods go the other way. Here you find quantitative descriptive analysis and flavour profile analysis, which try to describe the wine quantitatively on a range of defined attributes instead of gathering everything into a preference score. A related technique, free-choice profiling, reduces the need for extensive training by letting judges use their own words and then adjusting the data statistically with generalized Procrustes analysis.
For you as an enthusiast or professional, the point is less which number you land on, and more that you understand the difference between scoring your own enjoyment and describing the wine's properties. The two should not be mixed together. A note with a descriptive part and a separate overall assessment preserves both pieces of information instead of melting them together into a number that cannot be unpacked again.
Making Notes Comparable
Comparability is the whole difference between a collection of notes and a usable dataset. Within sensory analysis, precise requirements are therefore placed on the conditions. The judges are placed so they cannot see each other, and the room must be temperature-controlled, odour-free and quiet. You cannot replicate a laboratory at home, but you can transfer the principle directly: standardise the conditions you yourself control.
Standardise the conditions
Use the same type of glass, the same serving temperature and the same time of day, if you can. Taste in a room without competing aromas. A single foreign smell can shift your assessment, because the roughly five million olfactory neurons do not distinguish between the wine's aroma and the room's.
Standardise the sample and the order
Within grape ripening it is known that around ninety percent of the variation in a berry sample stems from the cluster's position on the vine and the degree of sun exposure, and that berries contain clear concentration gradients in different zones. The point is transferable: small differences in what and how you sample create large differences in the result. Pour the same amount, let the wine stand in the glass for the same length of time, and pay attention to the order, because the palate calibrates itself to the preceding wine.
Use a fixed vocabulary
The single most important factor is that you describe the same thing with the same words every time. If 'medium acidity' means one particular thing to you on one day and something else the next, your notes cannot be compared, no matter how neatly they are written. A fixed, internal reference point for each level, calibrated as described in the part on calibrating the palate, is what turns your notes into data.
In Short
- The note captures a fleeting sensory experience so it can be interpreted and compared later
- Follow the same structure every time: sight, smell, taste, conclusion, and write during the tasting, not afterwards
- Point systems are divided into affective (preference) and descriptive (description) approaches, and the two should be kept separate
- Comparability comes from standardised conditions, a standardised sample and above all a fixed vocabulary
- Aim for the four qualities that characterise a good sensory panel: accurate, repeatable, sensitive and reproducible data
Frequently Asked Questions
Should I use points, or are words enough?
Both have a place. Words (the descriptive) capture what the wine is, while a score (typically the affective) captures your overall assessment. If you use points, let them stand alongside the description, not instead of it, so you preserve the information a single number otherwise hides.
How do I keep my notes from becoming unreliable over time?
Standardise what you can control: glass, temperature, room and order. And use the same vocabulary with the same internal reference points, every time. It is the consistency in the language, not the wealth of detail, that makes the notes comparable.
Ready for the Next Step?
When you can capture and compare your impressions, you are ready for what it has all been pointing towards: assessing the wine's quality and potential. In the ninth and final part, Assessing Quality and Potential, we gather the threads and look at how structure, balance and phenolic compounds tell us something about both the present and the years ahead.
Feel free to bring your notes along when you explore the catalogue's wines, and try the method out on bottles you already know. And remember, amid all the systematics, that the best pairing is still the wine you like with the food you like. The note is there to help you remember why.