A bottle at a restaurant, a pour at a tasting, a glass at a dinner. A week later you remember that it was Italian and the label was cream colored. That is not enough to find it again, and it is certainly not enough to buy it.
Capture at the table, not afterwards
The best moment is while the bottle is still in front of you and before the second glass. Photograph the front label, and photograph the back if there is an importer or a producer address on it, because that is often what makes the wine findable later. For a wine by the glass, photograph the line on the list instead, or ask for the producer and vintage and write them down.
Ten seconds at the table beats twenty minutes of searching a week later. Vintage matters here more than people expect: the same wine two years apart can be a different purchase at a different price.
Three fields make it findable
A photograph alone loses the context that made the wine worth remembering. Add the setting and the price, and one sentence about the wine itself. Not a formal tasting note, one sentence.
Producer, wine and vintage: Where and when tasted: Price and format: glass, bottle, tasting pour: Why I liked it, in one line: Food it was served with: Would buy: yes / only under a price / no:
The price field does more work than it looks. A wine you loved at a restaurant markup may be ordinary value at retail, and a tasting pour at a fair tells you nothing about what a case costs. Recording what you paid stops a good memory from turning into a disappointing order.
Keep wishes out of the bottle count
A wine you want is not a wine you own. If it appears in the same list as your stock, every count is wrong and every "what should I open" question offers you bottles that are not in the house. Keep a separate list, or if your system has only one, record a quantity of zero and label the entry clearly as a wish.
The same rule applies in reverse. When you eventually buy the wine, the wish becomes stock with a real location, and the wish entry closes rather than living on as a second copy. The duplicate cleanup guide covers merging when two records for one wine have already appeared.
Promote a wish for a reason
Before ordering, check what you already have. A remembered wine often turns out to be very close to three bottles already in the rack, and the pre-purchase check takes less time than the order does. Then name the occasion: a weeknight, a specific meal, a bottle to keep for two years.
Wines bought without an occasion tend to sit. When it arrives, give it a real location and a note pointing back to where you first tasted it. That single line is what makes it easy to choose later, as the shortlist guide describes.
Prune the list honestly
A wish list nobody edits becomes noise, and noise gets ignored at exactly the moment it should be useful. Once a year, read it. If you have not bought a wine in twelve months and cannot remember why it is there, delete it. If the one-line reason still sounds good, move it to the top.