As noted in Greg’s thread on the closing of the eBob forum, I was this week VERY fortunate to be able to go into the now-public forum archives and rescue over 1,000 tasting notes of mine that I thought had been lost to me forever (I was not a subscriber when the forum migrated to Parker’s site.)
Now that I have them, I am tempted to get them formatted for a mass upload to CellarTracker, and also hire someone to scan and format over 10 years of selected tasting notes going back to 1995 in order to also put them on CellarTracker. Those notes- of which there are about two thousand- are all typed up, one page for each, and in massive binders that are quite a hassle from both a storage and ease-of-reference standpoint. I would do a lot of editing there to remove notes where I came across a fake or was tasting a daily drinker that is now long past best, etc.
Curious if anyone else has done this, and more generally what you think of the practice. For me personally, it would be GREAT to have them all preserved online in this format. But given the fact so many of them are 10+ years old, would it be an unwelcome posting of out-of-date data?
Probably wouldn’t be unwelcome, but I’d wonder how useful they would be at this date?
I was thinking about that earlier today when I found a few thousand paper TNs of mine dating back into the early 90s. I used to look at them from time to time to remind myself what I thought of something or if I’d even had it, but today a wine from 1994 is going to be very different from what it was then.
Strictly from an academic point of view, I’d be interested in seeing how well my predictions panned out. In fact I would love to know if I had any particular insight or not, but unfortunately I didn’t regularly indicate whether or not I thought something needed aging. Were I to go back and start over, I’d probably put that in every TN. If you had indicated those kinds of things, that might be something you’d like looking at.
This assumes a LOT of free time!
Best of luck and congrats on getting all your stuff back.
Seriously, if they’re going to close the forum, which isn’t clear, they should let people get their own notes, just as a gesture of goodwill to the wine community.
Tom, I have nothing but time and, if you have no pressure for entry timelines, the copying of TN’s into CellarTracker would most likely be a task that I could do in my more lucid moments.
I kinda agree with Greg about the usefulness aspect of adding really old notes. For example, there’s someone on CT who recently uploaded a TON of notes, and since we seem to drink similar wines, I see them all over the place.
That would be all fine and good…but the problem is that even though the note might be from the year 2000…they show up on top of the tasting notes, as he/she just uploaded them.
Luckily this person also chose to use all caps for every single note they uploaded, so I can more easily pick them out/skip over them…but it is kinda annoying (I know…1st world problems).
Maybe there’s a way to bulk-upload but make sure they populate by drink dates as opposed to the date they were posted??
Thanks everyone. I am a supporting member of CT, so was able to access and download the bulk update Excel sheet, on which I have made a start.
Appreciate the note on the actual date reflected- I certainly would not want my notes to go to the top of the list from a date perspective, and I am thinking the date field will cover me there. Will make sure of that before I do the upload.
Eric- appreciate your reply and I will reach out to your team this week to be sure I am populating the workbook correctly for ease of transfer and to ensure the tasting dates are reflected. I know this is going to generate some work on your end, and it does me a great convenience to have everything online, so I will be happy to make an additional contribution to account for the work needed.
Tom,
I think you should upload them even if they are a bit old. Reference points, even older ones, are valuable IMO. Reach out to Eric (who posted above) for help in sorting the best way to do it.
Feel free to shoot us a quick sample of your spreadsheet as you make it for a fast sanity check.
As for the buckeye76 comments, I want to point out that any user can choose to put any other user on their ignore list. You can also change the default sort of the tasting notes that you see. The default is order of entry, but you can change that to the date of the tasting note.
I see where you can do that if I’m looking at the entire list of a user’s notes, but maybe I’m missing it when looking at the TNs for a particular wine (i.e. the notes are from different people).
Remembering your notes, my guess is that you have a lot of notes on wines that are not drunk that widely and so will have fewer reviews. Thus, they will be more useful. In fact, you might want to focus more on small production wines and less on say classified Bordeaux, where there tends to be a lot of reviews.
On the other hand, it’s interesting to know what a lovely old wine tasted like when it was young, or what a 1982 Bordeaux tasted like in, say, the mid-90s. Was it tannic and tough as nails? Lacking in fruit? It would be interesting to compare to later notes.
You were there for many of the best ones. Seeing that archive was a trip down memory lane for sure.
Ok- I am convinced. This is a go. Eric- many thanks, I will send over a sample in a couple of days with a handful of entries. And yes, as Howard noted there will be quite a few that are not commonly tried, so in addition to be useful for me I hope it will be useful for others.
