For most of us, the decision to crack a bottle of wine open is of; choosing a beverage to accompany a meal,  a marker of relaxation or to celebrate with those nearest and dearest.  Occasionally these decisions unearth a particular bottle that excites the senses and as long as not to much is consumed even solidify these emotions into fond memories!

When I started this blog I realised that my motivations for drinking wine where changing, sure I will still choose wines based on the situation but now I find myself evaluating them in a new light, to this end I needed to find a way to keep some quick notes to refer back too and assist in developing  my palate.

Enter a cool little pocket book "33 bottles of Wine", this pocket sized record book is set up with the obsessed wine drinker in mind ( although it could be equally useful to an up coming sommelier) with in its 32 pages are a set of proforma tasting notes, to prompt the drinker through the process of recording your thoughts and impressions of the wine being consumed and capturing them for future reference.

So why would or should you consider capturing these musing and memories? well for the exact reasons you opened the bottle in the first place.

One of my favourite Celebrity Chefs Heston Blumenthal sums it up quite nicely with his  philosophy around the effect memory has on our food experience, watch any of his cooking shows and you will see that his wild  and crazy creations are all rooted in an attempt to recreate a particular memory or feeling for the consumer.  The same is true for our wine experiences, we will often remember a particular bottle of wine not because it was an exceptional example of the particular variety or that it demonstrated the skill of the wine maker, but because of the context in which it was drunk.  In this way it makes sense to have a method of quickly capturing what it is you love about the wine you are drinking in that moment.

For me the 33 bottles note book has been a very useful tool in this regard as it takes up very little space at 5"x 3.5" it is no bigger than a pocket note book and restricts you to the vital statistics; variety, winery, vintage and  key points of colour, flavours and aromas. Enabling a rapid record to be made and lets you get back to the reason for opening the bottle... that special occasion.