My starting point is to give an overall rating to each bottle I taste: excellent, very good, good, ok, poor, faulty
Since I want to see some relative comparison and at some tastings all bottles can be in the top three categories, I allow myself use of + and - as a modifier to each as well. I also break my own rules occasionally and allow an outstanding, or a dreadful. Potentially, this above could map onto a points score (or some ranges) but certainly doesn't provide the detailed discrimination that a 100pt scale using half-point resolution can, but I'm not sure I could provide reliable absolutes at that granularity, so this method suits me well.
Sometimes I find it difficult to define a common absolute range across different categories, so will suffix the rating, for example "good (for LBV)"; this generally happens in the lower part of what would otherwise be an absolute scale, where differentiating between several bottles I want to label all as "ok" or similar.
In addition to the overall rating, I add other notes as needed; I often also note a value for money rating (using the typical bottle cost for purchase, not how much I paid), as well as level of maturity. Equally I might note that it is very good but not quite my favoured taste. So overall, for each bottle I taste I record:
Date/location,
Bottle (category [VP, tawny, colheita, white, LBV], vintage, house, size)
Bottle source (including cost and when purchased, if one of mine)
Rating (excellent, very good, good, ok, poor, faulty) +/-
Rating comment (maturity, VFM)
Tasting notes / General comment (Sometimes colour, nose, taste, or any comments)
Regarding the tasting notes, I know I can sometimes be poor at naming flavour elements, so I tend only to post tasting notes for ports not shared with others who can do that far better than I, and for bottles which I think others might be interested in (e.g. you probably don't need yet another tasting note for W77 whenever I open a bottle
![Wink ;)](./images/smilies/icon_wink.gif)
but hopefully the recent CkQdC92 note might have been interesting as it less common.
In the end, I use my notes to help remind me about details of previous events, as well as to guide future purchasing and drinking. It would probably be useful to have these in a database form, but I use a simple excel spreadsheet which allows me to use the simple sort mechanism to easily list any house and/or year combination for all bottles I have tasted, when needed; that works well enough for my needs.