Imagine the benefits of an online tasting journal.

No more random bits of paper with “2005 Boxler Pinot Gris!!!” scribbled on them. Or “Muscat = spice, apricot.” Or “Say wines from Alsace, not Alsatian wine. An Alsatian is a dog.”

No more standing around a wine shop racking your brain, trying to remember the name of that Napa Syrah that completely threw you for a loop. No more frustrating yourself, or your friendly neighborhood retailer, as you struggle to describe the wine or even its label: “It was yellow, I think, and it had something to do with a stage coach…”

With an online tasting journal, random bits of information can be sorted neatly, all in one place. The Wines-I-loved can be positioned visually (with a symbol-based rating system!) next to Wines-that-were-okay and Wines-I’ll-never-drink-again. And since the journal is online and since I’m lucky enough to carry around a hand-held device with internet access, I can pull it up on a moment’s notice.

This week we experimented with Bottlenotes.com which, it needs to be said, has much more to offer than an online tasting journal. But for now we’re focusing on a feature of their site called My Wine Cellar, which is Bottlenotes’ version of a tasting journal I can access from any computer anywhere.

One of the most useful aspects of My Wine Cellar is that it allows users to list wines that Bottlenotes.com does not sell or represent. Its database contained every wine I tried to input regardless of its commercial affiliation. A “My Tasting Notes” pop-up box also allows me to fill in categories relevant to the wine like Where [I was when I was drinking it], When [I had it], Food [pairings], Notes [Say wines from Alsace…], Storage Location [just in case anyone has a wine cellar you need guidance to navigate], etc.

The two major benefits to this application are, 1) I keep track of the wines I’ve tried and I rate them on a 5-star scale, and 2) I answer a series of questions to create a personal taste profile. Once I do that, each wine I enter into My Cellar shows up with three colored dots in its listing. The dots designate the style of the wine. For example, the 2006 Trimbach Muscat showed up as three blue-green dots, which means it’s strongly aromatic. The 2005 Stagecoach Syrah showed up with two “spicy” dots and one “earthy” dot.

The color-coded system is visually appealing and very easy to read, and my personal taste profile is a stationary display (for easy reference) in the left-hand column of the screen of the My Wine Cellar pages.

The major drawback of the application is the tedium of entering every wine I’ve tried in the past. But, on the flip side, it isn’t going to be so difficult to enter wines on a regular basis going forward.

Bottlenotes also has a Facebook application, which is simple to add to your Facebook homepage and, since the application essentially replicates the information available through Bottlenotes’ My Wine Cellar and makes it available through Facebook, it offers another way to access the online tasting journal.

Which is what I was after in the first place.

(More on Facebook, and Bottlenotes’ application, later this week.)