How to write wine tasting notes

Start with the facts from the label

A note is only useful if you can tell later which wine it describes. Kendall-Jackson's guide to tasting notes suggests jotting down the producer, the wine's full name, the region it comes from, the grape variety or varieties, the price, and maybe the alcohol percentage before you taste anything. Add the vintage, and the date and place you opened the bottle.

The same guide recommends recording anything interesting you learn about the wine's background, such as a change of winemaker, the elevation of the vineyard, or its soil, because those details act as memory triggers when you reread the note. A photo of the front label covers most of the basics in one step and saves you from misspelling a producer you will want to find again.

Look, then smell

The Wine & Spirit Education Trust (WSET) teaches tasting in a fixed order called the Systematic Approach to Tasting, and its Level 2 version makes a good skeleton for anyone. Appearance comes first, with three observations: clarity (clear or hazy), intensity (pale, medium, or deep), and colour. In the WSET's terms, white wines run from lemon-green through lemon, gold, and amber to brown; rosés from pink to pink-orange and orange; and reds from purple through ruby, garnet, and tawny to brown.

On the nose, WSET asks whether the wine is clean or unclean, how intense the aromas are (light, medium, or pronounced), and what they are. Its Level 2 wine lexicon sorts aromas into three groups. Primary aromas come from the grape and alcoholic fermentation: citrus, stone fruit, red and black fruit, flowers, herbs, pepper. Secondary aromas come from winemaking after fermentation: bread and biscuit from yeast, butter and cream from malolactic conversion, and vanilla, cloves, or smoke from oak. Tertiary aromas come from maturation: dried fruit, leather, earth, mushroom, and tobacco in reds, and honey, nuts, orange marmalade, or petrol in whites.

Wine Folly's advice for writing these down is to list the most obvious aromas first, so the note has a hierarchy, and to attach an adjective where you can. Fresh pepper and dried pepper describe different wines. So do raspberry jam and tart, underripe raspberry.

Taste: describe the structure, not only the flavours

Kendall-Jackson suggests clearing your mouth first with water or something neutral, such as plain bread or crackers, and starting your notes with the second sip. Then work through the structure. WSET Level 2 gives each element a short scale: sweetness runs from dry through off-dry and medium to sweet; acidity, tannin, and alcohol are low, medium, or high; body is light, medium, or full; flavour intensity is light, medium, or pronounced; and the finish is short, medium, or long.

These words look dry on the page, but they are what makes a note comparable months later. If the scales feel abstract, Wine Folly offers physical comparisons. Body roughly corresponds to skim, 2% or whole milk. A high-acid wine has acidity similar to lemon or lime, while a low-acid wine is closer to watermelon. For tannin, ask whether it has grip, or in Wine Folly's words, whether it makes your lips stick to your teeth.

Give the finish its own line. Wine Folly calls it often the defining moment of a wine, the difference between the humdrum and the spectacular, and it is the first thing to disappear from memory once the glass is empty.

End with a conclusion you can use

WSET closes its Level 2 framework with a quality level: faulty, poor, acceptable, good, very good, or outstanding. That gives you a common anchor, but a note kept for yourself also needs a personal verdict. J.J. Buckley's tasting-note guide suggests creating your own rating system with stars or points, and going with your instincts and first impressions instead of overthinking, since you can refine a note later.

A practical conclusion answers two questions: how good is it, and would I buy or open it again? The second is the one you will care about in a shop. Put together, a complete note can be five lines long. Here is an example for a made-up wine:

Hollow Creek Syrah 2019 (fictional), $24, 14% ABV. Clear, deep ruby. Clean, pronounced nose: ripe blackberry, fresh black pepper, a little smoke. Dry, medium acidity, high tannin, full body, long peppery finish. Very good. Would buy again for a grilled dinner.

Common mistakes that make notes useless later

Writing it up from memory. A note written the next morning is mostly about the evening. Write while the glass is in front of you, even if it is three lines. Listing every aroma you can think of. A dozen descriptors read as noise; two or three of the strongest, in order and with adjectives, say more.

Skipping the boring facts. Without the producer and vintage, a note cannot be matched to the next bottle you see. Leaving out the verdict. A note that never says whether you liked the wine answers every question except the one you will ask. Using only flavour words. Structure words such as dry, high acidity, and full body are what let you compare two wines side by side.

If you keep notes on your phone, Sipbook is built around this habit: you photograph the label, give the wine your own rating, answer Would I have it again?, and add a tasting note, with vintage, grape, region, price, and place as optional fields. The records stay on the phone and can be exported to a CSV file.

Frequently asked questions