Writing a tasting note you will still understand next year
Three sentences beat three paragraphs, if they are the right three.
Write what you would say to a friend who asked whether to buy it. That sentence is the whole method. It forces a verdict, it forces a reason, and it filters out the decorative vocabulary that makes old notes unreadable.
Why most notes are useless a year later
Open a two-year-old note and you find "earthy, complex, well-balanced". Every one of those words is true of half the cigars you have smoked, which makes them worth nothing when you are standing in a shop deciding between two boxes.
The problem is not vocabulary size. It is that adjectives without a reference point do not survive time. "Sweet" means whatever your palate meant that evening. "Sweeter than the Nicaraguan I had on Tuesday" still means something in five years.
The three sentences worth writing
- What it tasted like, compared to something. Another cigar, a food, a drink — a fixed point, not a floating adjective.
- What it did over time. Cigars change; the interesting part is usually whether the middle held up or the last third fell apart.
- Whether you would buy it again, and why not if not. The "why not" is the part you will actually re-read.
That is sixty to eighty words. Long enough to be specific, short enough that you will still do it on the fourth cigar of the week.
Do this: ban the words "complex" and "balanced" from your own notes for a month. Both are conclusions, not observations, and forbidding them forces you to write down the thing that made you reach for the word.
Write it while it burns, not afterwards
Memory of taste decays fast and it decays selectively: the last third overwrites the first. A note written the next morning is a note about the ending. Two lines typed while the cigar is in your hand beat a paragraph written from memory the following day.
This is also why a note has to be quick to start. If recording something takes six taps and a form, you will do it for the first ten cigars and then stop, and the record you were building has a hole exactly where your taste was changing.
The number is a filter, not a verdict
Give it a score anyway, on whatever scale you keep — its job is not to be objective, it is to let you sort. A year in, "everything I rated eight or higher" is a list you can act on. That is the whole value of scoring, and it only works if you use the same scale every time.
Two habits make the number honest: score before you read anyone else's review, and never adjust a score afterwards because a cigar is famous. The point of your own record is that it is yours.
One screen, and the entry is done
An entry in Ligero is a photo of the band, the cigar, a score out of ten and a couple of sentences — one screen, and it closes when you save. The sommelier reads the band and fills in the name, format, wrapper and origin, so the part you type is the part only you can write. Everything you save syncs to your second phone and stays private unless you publish it.
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