How do you do yours?

In order to maintain some credibility to my claim to be part of the wine-blogging fraternity it helps to have something to blog about which is actually wine related, and so my wine notes have become a common feature in our house.

Being a student of the WSET my tasting notes do tend to follow a set format: Appearance, Nose, Palate, Conclusion and I can dash one off rather quickly. However, should I loose my way there is a rather nifty tasting check-list in the course pack which also hangs around the kitchen. The one draw-back to this approach is that my notes do tend to be rather formulaic; no doubt you've noticed.

Due to this rather speedy method of taking notes I tend to record them on whatever is to hand at the time: bank statements, envelopes, tax bills, daughter's artwork. "Look daddy, it's you...", "Yeah, yeah, whatever. Just pass me that crayon before I loose the original thought that this chablis is flint dry."

After a short period the collection of scrap paper starts to look just that - a collection of scrap paper and it begins to take over. But they do, eventually, make their way from the top of the bread-bin and into the study where they are securely corralled with a bull-dog clip until I get round to writing them up in my tasting book.

You have a tasting book don't you? Colour coded, indexed, cross-referenced, and in chronological order by tasting date.

Wine is my friend.

CHATEAU TOUR ST BONNET 2002

Latitude Wine £10.99 (tasted 26.ii-'09)

A 'Grand Vin du Bordeaux' Medoc claret at 12.5% with a cork closer and a fabulous deep red brick tinted colour. Clean medium nose showing jammy black fruits and oaky vanilla. Obviously dry with no acid, the good tannins present more fruit than one would expect from the nose: Cadbury's Fruit and Nut (a bar slightly warm and bought from the motorway service station to be exact) yet it has a surprising light body. My bottle did throw quite a heavy sediment so I would probably decant the next one as it also definitely opened up in the glass and bottle.

A decent enough wine to start any 'Claret Thursday'.

Just as an aside, according the The Oxford Companion to Wine, "the term 'Grand Vin' is often used to indicate the main wine of the Chateau, no matter how grand or humble the wine or the chateau." Thank you Jancis! So what we have here is a Bordeaux AC from the Medoc.