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You're standing in the wine aisle scrolling through forty photographs of wine labels. One of them was the bottle you loved at a friend's birthday in March. You have no idea which. So you buy something that looks vaguely familiar, take it home, and discover you've bought this exact wine before and didn't like it then either.
Learning how to keep track of the wines you've tried is the least glamorous wine skill there is, and probably the most useful. Here's what to record, what to skip, and why the camera roll approach keeps letting you down.
Why is it so hard to remember a wine you liked?
Wine names are built to defeat memory. A single bottle might carry a producer, a proprietary name, a grape, a region, a sub-region and a year, in a language you don't speak, in a typeface designed in 1890. Two bottles from neighbouring villages can look nearly identical.
Then there is the year. The same wine from the same vineyard genuinely does taste different from one vintage to the next, because the weather in each growing season leaves its mark on the grapes — a difference that is strongest in regions with unpredictable weather and much smaller in consistently warm climates. So "the Chablis with the blue label" won't get you back to the bottle you liked. You need the year too.
Most of us try to solve this by photographing the label. That captures the bottle's identity, but it records nothing about the part that mattered: whether you liked it, and why.
What should you actually record about a wine?
A useful note has four parts. Anything more is a bonus; anything less usually turns out useless twelve months later.
1. The identity
Producer, wine name, vintage, region and grape variety. This is what lets you or a shop assistant find the bottle again. If you are unsure which words on the label are which, our guide to reading a wine label breaks down what each line is telling you.
2. The verdict
One field, and the most valuable one: would you buy it again? Yes, no, or only for a particular occasion. Ratings out of five drift over time — your three-star from last year is probably today's four — but "buy again" stays honest.
3. What it was actually like
You don't need a paragraph. Four short judgements will do: how sweet, how acidic, how tannic, how full-bodied. These are the structural elements professionals assess on the palate, and they're what makes one wine feel different from another in the mouth. If those words are still slippery, our explainer on wine characteristics and how to identify them covers each one — and the difference between fruitiness and sweetness is worth knowing before you write "sweet" about a bone-dry wine that simply tastes of ripe fruit.
4. The context
What you ate with it, where you bought it, roughly what it cost, who you were with. Price and source let you find it again; the rest is what makes reading your own log a pleasure rather than admin.
Do you need professional tasting-note language?
No. There is a formal framework — WSET's Systematic Approach to Tasting, which walks through appearance, nose, palate and conclusions and is taught in more than 70 countries — but it exists so a buyer in one country and an educator in another can describe the same wine and be understood. That is a communication problem, not your problem.
Decanter made the point well: notes written for yourself only need to communicate with one person. Their contributor Paul Keers uses "heft" to describe body, and once recorded a white wine as tasting of a relative's poached pears. Nobody else can use that note. It works perfectly for him.
Where standard vocabulary does earn its keep is the moment you want to ask someone for something similar. "Medium-bodied, high acidity, not oaky" gets you a far better recommendation than "the nice red one".
Why doesn't a photo of the label work on its own?
Photos are excellent at identity and hopeless at everything else. Your camera roll isn't searchable by grape, doesn't sort by whether you liked something, and mixes wine labels in with screenshots and photos of your dog. A photograph also can't tell you six months later whether you took it because the wine was wonderful or because you wanted to remember never to buy it again.
The fix isn't to stop photographing labels. It's to attach a verdict to the photograph.
Spreadsheet, notebook, or app: which actually works?
A notebook is lovely and needs no battery. It's also at home in a drawer while you're standing in a shop deciding what to buy — and you can't search it.
A spreadsheet solves searching and sorting, then fails on entry: typing a producer, region and vintage into a phone spreadsheet at a restaurant table is enough friction that most people quietly stop after a dozen bottles.
An app removes the typing, which is the part that kills the habit. Scanning a label pulls the identity in automatically, leaving you only the part a machine can't know — what you thought.
That is the job Swirl is built for. Scan a label and you get sweetness, acidity, body, tannins, grape, region and food pairings drawn from winemakers' technical sheets rather than crowd reviews. Rate the wine, add your own notes, and file it into a collection — there's a preset "My cellar" for bottles you have at home, and you can build your own. Scanned wines stay in your scanned list, and your ratings and notes are private, never public. You can also add photos and a note about who you shared the bottle with, which is closer to how people actually remember wine.
What a wine log can't do for you
Being straight about this matters more than the sales pitch.
No tool tastes for you. An app can tell you a wine is high in acidity; only you can record that you found it too sharp. The note is still your job.
Scanners miss bottles. Very small producers, damaged or heavily decorated labels and unusual bottlings can defeat label recognition. In Swirl you can type what you know instead, and add your own photo to that entry, which only you can see — but that's a workaround, not magic.
A log is only as good as your honesty. It's tempting to rate the expensive bottle highly. That one act of politeness is what makes people's own records useless to them.
Vintages shift. Your note is about the year you drank. If you loved a 2021 and the shop has 2023, expect a family resemblance rather than a repeat — which is also why some wines improve with age and others are best drunk young.
How do you build a habit that survives past ten bottles?
Log at the table, not the next morning — you won't do it the next morning. Keep the minimum note to one line and a verdict, so a tired Tuesday still gets recorded. Always answer "would I buy this again". Always record the vintage. And read back through before you go shopping, which is the entire point of keeping the record. After thirty or so bottles you'll start seeing patterns you never noticed — perhaps that you consistently prefer higher acidity, or that you've been buying a grape variety you don't actually enjoy.
Ready to stop forgetting the good bottles?
Swirl turns the wine you drank last night into something you can find again. Scan the label, rate it, add a private note, and file it into a collection you'll actually revisit. Over time your ratings build a personal taste profile, so recommendations are shaped by your palate rather than strangers' scores.
Scan any wine label, or type what you know if the bottle isn't in front of you
Rate wines and keep private tasting notes that are never made public
Organise favourites into collections, including a "My cellar" collection for bottles at home
See sweetness, acidity, body, tannins, grape, region and food pairings for every bottle
Get personalised recommendations built from your own ratings
Free to download on iOS and Android, with an optional Swirl Pro subscription. Download Swirl and start keeping track of what you love
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Head Sommelier
Marcus is our Head Sommelier with experience in highly regarded places including 1, 2 and 3-Michelin-starred restaurants. With over 10 years of experience, he's passionate about helping people having unforgettable wine experiences.
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