The idea for this project came during a holiday trip. It was one of those battery-charging excursions where, if you’re lucky, you get a chance to completely get away from anything that looks like your office. It was this past February, right after the big push in preparation for 3GSM, when my partner and I took a couple of weeks to visit the Temecula Valley in California. The valley is a great little wine region just northeast of San Diego. The mountains were gorgeous; the weather was perfect.

 

It doesn't get much better than this. You can just feel the vineyard waiting for spring rain and summer sun. Photo taken with N93 by me.  

 

As an anniversary present, my partner gave me a wine tasting journal. It’s a great little notebook, nicely bound, with pages well organized for recording the experience of tasting wine with friends. A couple of days into the trip I got a chance to make the first entry – a tasting of a 2003 Carbernet Franc from the local La Cereza vinery. We bought the bottle earlier that day from a local wine shop where we had a great conversation with the owner, a native of Costa Rica who first came to the US with his ambassabor mother. He’s been running the local wine shop since he helped his step-father fix up the historic store-front where he’s located. It’s just the sort of story and personal connection that I love to make when traveling.

 

The next day Elaine and I joined a small tour group and visited four local wineries. We came back with some new friends, several cases of great wine, a pocket-full of tasting sheets from the wineries, and some great pictures taken with my N93. You can probably see where this story is going, but I didn’t until the next day as I was organizing our notes and discussing which wine to taste for the evening. I had spread out on a table all our tasting notes from the previous day, the nice tasting notebook from the evening before, and my N93.

 

Three ways to take notes. Only one fits in your pocket. Photo by me. 

 

I love the tasting notebook and will continue to use it for special occasions – it includes a technique for removing the wine label and saving it. There’s something about having a real piece of the experience that can’t be duplicated.

 

But for the rest of the time, I want to be able to capture the experience with much less planning and much less fanfare than comes from pulling a notebook out at the table of a fine restaurant. I want to be able to use my N93 as a multimedia tasting notebook. I may not be able to remove the wine label, but the resolution and optics of the camera let me read every word of a label I photograph using the macro setting. The camera also lets me take pictures of the people with whom I share the experience and the setting in which I find myself. For note-taking, why write or type when I can talk?

 

So the basic concept is to write a small application that lets me create “tasting records” consisting of a collection of images and sound clips. The concept originated as a wine tasting application, but I’ll shape it so it works equally well for tasting teas, or chocolate, or coffee. I suppose I could always just create blog posts, but the experiences I’m capturing are not ones I care to post in an internet page and I don’t want to hit a server and pay for bandwidth every time I want to browse my notebook. And besides, I’ve been looking for an excuse to develop something myself, something that does exactly what I want. Here’s my excuse.