Over forty minutes we covered everything from cellar construction and cellaring conditions to investment strategies in the current economic environment with side-tracks to cover each wine and a timely reference to the importance of taking notes when you’re going tasting.
Hughesy doesn’t get to wineries that often, so while the guy at the cellar door has a range of wineries within reach and the opportunity to develop a thorough note-taking system (I suspect a notebook rather than scribbled notes on whatever publicity material happens to be lying around the premises).
I hadn’t quite progressed that far at this point in proceedings.
Following his suggestion, I tried to take notes at each of the places we visited.
Looking back over the accumulated materials as I type, the records vary wildly and don’t always give an accurate summary of my reaction to the winery.
From here on, where there’s a lengthy discussion it means that I’d ended up with plenty of notes (I’m typing this a fortnight later from written notes compiled a day or two after we visited the winery in question).
In other cases, I took notes which then somehow got lost in the shuffle between the tour and the write up in the journal.