Building a Better Way to Remember Wine

Digital Notes started from a pretty simple idea: wine tasting is a rich experience, but most of what you actually notice in the moment gets forgotten almost immediately.

A photo of the bottle doesn't cut it. Neither does a plain five star rating. What actually makes a wine memorable is everything around it. The aromas, the structure, the balance, the finish, what you paired it with, and honestly just the personal impression it left on you.

When I started looking into this, I didn't want to build another generic wine rating app. I wanted to understand how wine professionals actually go through the evaluation process. So I sat down with a few professional sommeliers and worked through how they taste, the vocabulary they use, and what a proper tasting note is even supposed to look like.

That collaboration ended up becoming the foundation for the whole product.

Digital Notes takes that professional tasting process and turns it into something simple enough for anyone to use. It walks people through the different parts of a tasting, appearance, aromas, taste, structure, overall impression, rating, while still leaving space for personal notes and whatever memory they want to attach to it.

The goal was never to turn everyone into a sommelier. It's more about helping people become a bit more aware of what they're drinking and slowly figure out their own taste.

Over time, every tasting adds up into a personal wine library. So instead of trying to remember "what was that Italian wine I really liked last year," people can just go back through their own notes, compare things, spot patterns, and get a much clearer sense of what they actually like.

For me this was also a fun product problem to work on. Taking something that's normally expert driven and pretty complex, learning directly from the people who actually know it, and turning that into something that feels simple and approachable.

It's the kind of project I enjoy most. Start with a real behavior people have, learn from people who really understand the domain, and use technology to make that knowledge easier to access.