by Patchen Markell » Fri Jan 09, 2026 6:44 am
Sorry I’m late to this conversation. (As you can tell, my presence here has gotten sporadic of late, and my note-writing even more so.) But I think this is a great question.
Developing some themes that have been mentioned here: for me, the fundamental thing is that writing notes, no matter how you do it, with or without a dictionary, a salad bowl, a hundred-point scale, or anything else, is a discipline of attention, a way of training yourself to be reflexive about the experience you’re having when you taste or drink.
That can be done analytically, or with literary flourish, or both, and I think my purposes in doing it have changed over the years: early on, writing notes was a way of learning about wine by giving structure to my impressions. And learning about wine was a way of… what? Of adding a dimension of knowledge and understanding to my experience of wine (maybe the definition of a geek is someone who gets additional pleasure out of knowing where a pleasure came from and how it works). And of being better able to find and drink (what seems to me) excellent wine, at home or out in the world.
Now… of course I’m still learning, but I’m also not focused on the research-and-collect side of wine as much as I used to be. (I’m now avidly collecting something else, a hobby I turn out to share with one other longtime WLDG member, who can disclose himself if he wants to.) So now I write notes more for the sake of my middle-aged memory than anything else, and to maintain a kind of baseline attentional fitness, if you like… the same way I keep cycling like a maniac (indoors and out) even though, at this point, I’m not entering any races. (I mean, I’ve never been a racer, but in my 40s I thought maybe I would give it a shot…)
But there’s also this: I think we (here) write notes for each other, or at least I do. (I think of this as a literary echo of the fact that wine is fundamentally social, something to be shared.) This was not the only place I learned how to pay attention to wine, but it was a significant part of that education. And that means that how I think about and experience wine has been shaped by all of you, and by participants past: not just by your tastes and preferences and advice, but by watching and reading how you write. Early on, there was a lot of experimental imitation in my TNs, which (as in any social situation), was probably influenced in part by my desire to fit in to a scene full of older, more experienced people. I think now I probably just sound like myself, not like someone who’s trying to sound like someone else. (And thank you, Jenise, for the enormous compliment, which at least tells me that I do have a style of my own.) But whatever that style is, it wouldn’t be what it is without the last 25 years of the WLDG. And it’s still true that what sometimes gets me to record a note, these days, is the thought that a particular bottle was I’d like to share with you guys, even if only in words.
Happy new year!
cheers, Patchen
