WTN: Post your wine tasting notes!

[Craig Camp]

Tasting notes can be one of the most useful parts of a wine discussion forum. Sharing information helps everyone experience new wines, get updates on the progress of wines in our own cellars and make informed buying decisions. We welcome and encourage tasting note postings of all wines - no matter the price.

In order to make these notes easy to find and use, we ask you post them in this simple format, starting with 'WTN:', to identify it as a tasting note. On the Topic title line enter:

WTN: wine name, producer name, vintage

So Spottswoode Cabernet Sauvignon would look like this:

WTN: Cabernet Sauvignon, Spottswoode, 1997

You can also use the topic description line if the name is too long.

If the post is for a group of wines of the same type title the post in this way:

WTN: Various Napa Valley Cabernet or TN: Various Italian

Tasting notes are more useful if at least grouped by country of production instead of mixing French and Italian wines in one big note. A notable exception would be a head-to-head comparison of a particular grape type produced in various countries - like a comparison of sangiovese wines produced in California and Italy.

Don't forget to list all pertinent information at the top of the note because the whole name of the wine and the region often does not fit in the title line. For instance, at the top of the Spottswoode post it would be helpful to restate the name of the wine with all the information like this:

Cabernet Sauvignon, Spottswoode, 1997, Napa Valley

These style rules do not refer to the now famous 'Florida Jim' style, which is renowned for its glorious and lyrical descriptions of wine and food combinations. Please Jim, don't change a thing - just post more!

[tommy]

it would really be great if "TN:" were searchable with the search engine. sadly, it's too few characters.

[Craig Camp]

it would really be great if "TN:" were searchable with the search engine.  sadly, it's too few characters. 

One step at a time Tommy - when we get more tasting notes we can create a new system. In the meantime the wine names - like Cabernet are searchable. OK?

[tommy]

it would really be great if "TN:" were searchable with the search engine.  sadly, it's too few characters. 

One step at a time Tommy - when we get more tasting notes we can create a new system. In the meantime the wine names - like Cabernet are searchable. OK?

deal.

[Fat Guy]

What I think wise Tommy is saying is that if we make it WTN then people can enter "WTN" into the search engine for a title search to find every post that has tasting notes. The search engine cutoff for a search string is 3 characters minimum. Or it could be "NOTES" or anything that's 3 or more characters. Is that what you're saying, wise Tommy?

[tommy]

What I think wise Tommy is saying is that if we make it WTN then people can enter "WTN" into the search engine for a title search to find every post that has tasting notes. The search engine cutoff for a search string is 3 characters minimum. Or it could be "NOTES" or anything that's 3 or more characters. Is that what you're saying, wise Tommy?

yeah, i suppose. i guess what i'm assuming is that the literal "TN:" is not searchable with the current version of the software. i haven't tested that, but i know that "pho", for example, doesn't return decent results (or at least it didn't when i tried a while back).

a database is only as good as its indexing. if i could search on "TN:" and have all of the tasting notes returned, it might make for some interesting midnight reading. if not, i'm stuck reading my bio at midnight, and trust me, that gets pretty boring.

[Fat Guy]

The software can be set any way we want it. Most Invisionboard sites select a four-character minimum on search terms (that's what the developers recommend). We have our search engine set to a three-character minimum. If you go down to two and people start searching for words like "be" it can really kill server performance, so nobody does it. Even Google won't let you search for little words like that. The pho issue is different -- you're referring to the fact that a search for pho gives pho as well as phone. We're changing over to a user-selectable wildcard search in v1.2 of the software, so apple will only give apple and apple* will give apple or applesauce. But we'll most likely never allow a two-letter search.

[tommy]

indeed the option of an "absolute" search is invaluable to any software product that supports searching (searching on "be" returing "behold"). but so is the ability to search on a literal that stands alone. we should have the ability to search on "TN:" to return all occurrences of "TN:", nothing more, nothing less (not "TN:TOMMYISGREAT"). at least, that's my point in the context of this discussion. if it ain't indexable, it ain't nuthin.

(just searched on "TN:" and the search engine returned zippo. that exercise speaks for itself)

edit:

We're changing over to a user-selectable wildcard search in v1.2 of the software, so apple will only give apple

my point.

But we'll most likely never allow a two-letter search.

no need for that. i was just suggesting that whatever standard that you choose for "tasting notes" should be searchable. "TN:" is not.

Edited July 5, 2003 by tommy (log)

[Craig Camp]

We can change it to whatever works. I suggested 'TN:' only because it seems to be the standard on wine discussion boards.

if we need 3 why not WTN:?

[Fat Guy]

Sounds good to me. I think we can do some SQL queries to change all the current TN thread titles to WTN. Once we do that we can alter the instructions above and expunge all this follow-up.

[Craig Camp]

OK - let me know when to change the instructions.