How to Make a Killer Wine Journal – Cheap!

March 6th, 2007 → 4:41 pm @ Josh Hermsmeyer


If you love wine you’ve probably at least glanced at the fancy wine journals you can buy from the likes of Wine Enthusiast and elsewhere. They let you scrawl a few tasting notes and scrapbook labels into a central repository that you can file away and look up the next time you want to know what you thought of a particular wine.

Much of this functionality is now replicated with a bunch of the new wine sites online, but for me there is something very attractive about having a tangible thing in my hand. Ephemera, a physical token of an experience – whatever you want to call it – just appeals to me.

The thing is every journal I’ve ever seen has been so unbelievably overpriced and downright fugly that I just never bothered. I don’t want some overly-serious leather bound tome with flowery script on the cover – or worse – some lame still life of a wine bottle or a vine peering back at me every time I decide to do a little scribbling. Yet at the same time a plain old spiral bound notebook didn’t seem to fit the bill either. I’m a Mac user after all, and I want my tools to be beautiful as well as practical.

Enter the Moleskine. Pronounced either Mole-skin, Mole-skeen, or Mol-uh-skeen-uh, the little black notebooks were the Macbooks of the early 20th century. Originally available only from Parisian stationery shops, Hemingway used them to write the rough draft of the Sun Also Rises while dining at various cafes around the city. Van Gogh used them to doodle and sketch what later became “Sunflowers”, and Picasso and Matisse dabbled with them as well.

And now you can use one as your wine journal since they fit the bill perfectly. The best model I’ve found for wine journaling is the Large Sketchbook. It’s 5 1/4″ by 8 1/4″, with 100 blank archival quality pages and a killer little page-sized folder in the very back to hold wine label removers. It comes with a cloth bookmark and convenient band that wraps around the opening to secure any loose items you might keep in it as well. Plus it just looks cool.

Best of all Moleskines are pretty cheap, especially when you consider that they have a HUGE aesthetic advantage over every other wine journal out there. They generally run 15 bucks per, with small discounts for larger orders online. You can also run down to Barnes and Noble and grab one there.

But if you are a serious journaler and want to buy in bulk, where you can save some really major cash is on wine label removers. Without exception, all retail wine label removers are insanely – ludicrously – overpriced for what they are – basically some mylar and a bit of stickum. You can buy a box of of the 4×6 ScotchPads, which normally sell for as much as $23 per 25 sheets, at R.S. Hughes for only $56 plus shipping for 1000 sheets. That’s a buck eighty (with shipping included) for 25 sheets, a savings of something like one million percent. Score!

Put it all together and you’ve got a first class wine journal for cheap. Let me know in the comments if you give it a try. We might offer them in our tasting room at some point, and the feedback would be really valuable.

Finally a quick tip: don’t just write about what the wine tasted like, which can get mind numbingly stale. Instead write about the circumstances that surrounded you drinking it. It’ll make going back through and reading about the juice you’ve tasted much more enjoyable.