Most tasting journals are somewhere to write. This one reads what you wrote and gives you something back. The Whiskey, Wine & Spirits Tasting Journal is a nine-tab workbook that logs the bottles you buy and the glasses you actually drink, then works out what a pour of each bottle costs you, which bottles are earning their price, which open bottles want drinking before they fade, and — from your own scores, not anyone else’s — which flavor families you keep rating highest.
Then it turns that around and points it at your wishlist. Tag a bottle you are hunting with the flavors you expect from it, and the workbook scores those against your own palate and tells you how likely you are to love it, before you spend anything.
It works in Excel, Google Sheets and LibreOffice, and it’s yours to keep.
What does the Tasting Journal actually compute?
Nine connected tabs turn a shelf of bottles and a pile of notes into something that answers questions:
- Bottle Log — one row per bottle. Your bottle size and the pour you actually give yourself become pours per bottle, then cost per pour, then the value still sitting in the bottle. Add a tasting, and My Score and the Value Index fill themselves in.
- Tastings — one row per glass. Nose, palate, finish and balance scored out of ten become one score out of 100, weighted the way you decide on the Setup tab. Change a weight and every score in the file moves with it.
- Palate Profile — you type nothing here. It averages your own scores across fourteen flavor families, counts how many tastings sit behind each one so you can tell a preference from an anecdote, does the same by category and by region, and writes your taste signature in a sentence.
- Wishlist — tag what you expect and get a Match % against that profile, an estimated cost per pour, and a verdict in plain language: from “Strong match — chase this one” down to “Off your palate — try it at a bar first.”
- Dashboard — bottles on the shelf, what you spent, what is still in the bottles, best value by score per unit of cost, and the open bottles that want drinking. Every number reads live from the other tabs.
- Setup — units in ml or fl oz, your standard pour, your currency, the four scoring weights, and the freshness thresholds.
- Flavor Wheel — the fourteen families with their descriptors, the production step behind each and what each is confused with. This is the vocabulary the tag check reads.
- Regions & Styles — 46 regions and styles, each with what defines it, its typical ABV, and what to expect in the glass.
Why cost per pour changes how a shelf looks
A bottle price is the wrong unit. Nobody drinks a bottle in one go — you drink pours, over months. Divide what you paid by the pours in the bottle and the comparison between an everyday bottle and a special one becomes a real comparison rather than a flinch. In the worked example that ships with the file, a $1.12 pour sits on the row directly above an $8.04 one.
The Value Index goes one step further: your own score divided by that cost per pour. It answers a different question from what is best. It answers what am I getting for the money — and the two answers are rarely the same bottle.
Open bottles, judged by what is in them
An opened bottle changes, and how fast depends entirely on what it is. A still wine is a few days; a cask-strength whisky is a year. So the freshness thresholds are per category — eight editable rows, each with its own days-open and fill-level trigger, each explained. Days open and how much is left drive a computed Fresh / Drink Soon / Past Peak flag, and the Dashboard lists the flagged bottles furthest past their own threshold first.
It never tells you something has gone off. It nudges you to finish what is open before you open something else.
Built so it cannot quietly break
Every log tab is one row per thing, so you can sort and filter freely — which is exactly why this is not a beautiful page per bottle. A printed page cannot be sorted, totaled or counted, and this can. Categories, styles, regions, statuses, glassware and the rest are closed dropdown lists that refuse an off-list value, because a typo in a category is invisible and quietly wrong in every total afterward. The one place a typo could still hide — the free-text flavor tags — has a Tags OK? column that says OK once every tag lands, and Check the moment one of them matches no family.
Own it, don’t rent it
Every app that has held your tasting notes can shut down, change its terms, or move the export behind a subscription. This is a plain workbook. It opens in Excel, Google Sheets and LibreOffice, it works with no connection, and nothing in it phones home. Prefer Google Sheets? The bundle includes a clickable Make a copy link to a version built natively in Sheets — no import, nothing lost.
There is also a free Tasting Journal starter if you want to try the idea before you buy the full journal.
This is a personal tasting journal, not advice about drinking, buying or investing. The example bottles, producers and prices in the workbook are invented, and are there so every column shows a real number the moment you open it. Style definitions and typical ABV ranges describe general conventions rather than guarantees — regulations vary by country and change over time.
