How to Track the Wine You Drink
The whole game of tracking wine is capturing the bottle before it disappears — the label photographed or scanned, six quick scores, one line about the night. Wine has the cruellest forgetting curve of any drink: the bottle goes to the recycling, the restaurant list goes back to the waiter, and "that incredible Douro red from Sofia's birthday" becomes unfindable by Tuesday.
Catch the label, then the wine
The label carries everything you'll need to find the bottle again: producer, region, vintage, grape. In Crumble's wine journal (a free add-on), with Crumble Plus scanning the label adds the bottle to your shelf with the details filled in by AI — done before the next course arrives. No scan culture at the table? A phone photo now, logged properly tomorrow, still beats memory.
Six axes, no wine-speak required
- Sweetness — bone-dry to dessert; where the wine sits, not where the fruit pretends it is.
- Acidity — the freshness that makes you want the next sip (and cuts through rich food).
- Tannin — the grippy, drying structure of reds; silky or sandpaper.
- Body — featherweight Beaujolais to heavyweight Barossa Shiraz.
- Fruit — how loud the fruit sings, from austere mineral to jam.
- Oak — vanilla, toast, spice from the barrel; seasoning or the whole dish.
Score the six, write one honest line — "cherry and pencil shavings, great with the lamb, under €18" — and you've out-noted most restaurant sommeliers' guests. The radar does the long-term work: a year in, you'll see your high scores cluster at high-acid, low-oak, and suddenly your buying gets sharper.
Wine bars, restaurants, and the bottle you drank there
Most memorable wines arrive at tables, not from your own rack — which is why a wine journal works best inside a restaurant tracker. On Crumble the venue side is free: the wine bar gets a pin and a rating, the wishlist holds the natural-wine place you keep meaning to try, and friends see your finds on the shared map. The bottle's session note references the dinner it belonged to.
Honest alternatives
Vivino is unbeatable for crowd ratings and price comparison at the shelf — point it at a label and see what the world thinks. CellarTracker is the collector's choice: deep cellar management, drinking windows, community tasting notes at scale. Crumble's lane is different: private by default, notes shared with actual friends, and one app where your wine journal lives next to your whisky, coffee, and restaurant map. Plenty of people run Vivino for the shop and Crumble for the memory.
Frequently asked questions
How do I remember wines I liked?
Capture the bottle before it leaves the table: photograph or scan the label, score it, add one line about what you ate with it. The label is the part everyone forgets — a week later "that Portuguese red" matches two hundred bottles at the shop. Apps with label scanning (Crumble, Vivino) exist precisely for this moment.
What is the best app for wine tasting notes?
Depends what you want. Vivino is the giant for crowd ratings and price checks; CellarTracker is the serious collector's database. Crumble's free wine add-on fits if you want your wine notes living alongside your restaurant map and other drink journals — shelf, six-axis scoring, shared with friends only, with an AI label scan on Crumble Plus.
What should beginner wine tasting notes include?
Six scores and a sentence. Sweetness, acidity, tannin, body, fruit, oak — each 0 to max — then one honest line ("cherry + vanilla, smooth, would buy again under €15"). Skip the wine-speak; your notes only need to make sense to future you.
Should I track restaurant wines too?
Especially those — restaurant pours are where you meet wines you'd never buy blind. Log the wine against the restaurant (which you're tracking anyway), and the dinner context comes free: the wine, the dish it played against, the place to order it again.