Our Sip Notes
Getting better at wine, one sip at a time
We’re Katie and Krista.
We love wine. We’re studying it seriously. And we’re still very much in the middle of figuring it out.
SipNotes is where we write from that middle.
We’re working our way through a wine diploma program—tasting widely, studying intentionally, traveling through wine regions, and slowly learning how to pay better attention to what’s in the glass. Some days things click. Some days they absolutely don’t. We’re a few steps ahead, not experts.
What we write about here
This Substack is a weekly record of learning wine in real time.
You’ll find:
Wines we’re tasting and how we’re thinking about them
Regions and producers that changed our assumptions
Study notes from the diploma trenches—what stuck, what surprised us, what needs another pass
Winery visits and travel moments that added context you can’t get from a map.
Reflections on building confidence, vocabulary, and pattern recognition over time.
Posts are clearly labeled as Katie’s sip notes or Krista’s sip notes, because we don’t taste (or learn) the same way, and that difference turns out to be useful.
As we’ve gone deeper into studying wine, we started building MySipNotes—an app designed to help wine learners track tastings, notice patterns, and grow confidence over time without turning wine into homework.
Pour something interesting. We’ll be here.
Katie’s Origin Story
I didn’t grow up around wine. At holidays, it was a box of red and a box of white—and that was the extent of it.
In the early 2010s, everything changed after I read Cork Dork by Bianca Bosker. It cracked open a world I didn’t know existed: the possibility of precision in tasting, the language of flavors and texture, and the intellectual depth of wine.
Not long after, I started going to weekly blind tastings at a local wine bar with friends. We laughed a lot, guessed wildly, and got it wrong 99% of the time. What made it stick were the patient, generous wine professionals who shared their knowledge without judgment and who shared their passion for the craft.
What I love most about wine is how fully it engages you. It asks for your attention—your memory, your senses, your curiosity. Smell, sight, texture, taste, context, time. To me, wine is time-based art.
I love what it brings to a table full of friends. And I love the challenge of studying it—learning to notice more, articulate better, and stay curious.
Krista’s Origin Story
I can’t pinpoint the exact moment I fell in love with wine, but I know when it became an obsession: my first blind flight, when I realized that I could barely tell more than a red from a white. Now, several years and many bottles later, I’m in a wine diploma program.
With a background in science and a love of art, I'm drawn to how wine combines the two, and to how it captures the essence of the place it was made. I love how wine changes over time, how my palate evolves with it, and how opening a bottle — whether a familiar friend or something completely new — always feels like discovery.
As I study and learn, I’ll be sharing those discoveries, my “aha” moments, and tasting experiences (including the mortifying guesses that weren’t even close). My main goal is the joy of learning itself. and maybe, eventually, ordering from a wine list without that tiny moment of panic that I’m making a terrible mistake.
