The Case for Keeping Tasting Notes Honest

Every taster reaches a moment, somewhere around their thirtieth or fortieth serious tasting, where the consensus on a bottle and their own experience of the bottle drift apart. The internet says it's peat-forward; you're getting more brine than peat. The reviewer says it's a 94; you'd give it an 87. The professional notes say leather and tobacco; you keep tasting cherry.

That moment is the most important one in your tasting development, and it's also the one where most people quietly start cheating. They write down what they're supposed to taste instead of what they actually taste. They round their score toward the consensus. They drop the cherry note because it doesn't fit the canonical profile.

This is a self-defeating loop. Tasting notes that pull toward the consensus train you to taste the consensus. Two years of consensus-flavored notes and you've lost what was distinctive about your palate — and the recommendations that downstream systems can build for you become useless because the data doesn't describe you, it describes the consensus you've been imitating.

The harder, slower path is to write down what you actually noticed and trust that over time your idiosyncrasies will resolve into something coherent. That cherry note that doesn't belong might be the leading edge of a real preference for fruit-forward bourbons that the canonical profile is missing. Or it might just be the cherry you ate before the pour. Either way, you can't learn which until you write it down honestly enough to see the pattern.

The product takes its name seriously. The library is yours. The notes are yours. Don't let anyone else write them for you.