I love fine wines and I love fine books. So it has been natural for me to keep notes on the wines that I have savoured – and to write them down in a suitable journal. But I never found a ready-made wine log to my taste.

Most commercially available wine logs have a pretty printed frame on the right-hand page for you to stick your wine labels in, and on the left-hand page they have printed headings for ‘varietals’, ‘vintage’, ‘vineyard’ etc – all of which information is usually available on the label!

I prefer to write my own headings and to keep my own notes. So I finally decided to make my own wine log. My ideal wine log needs to have pages with plenty of space to glue a wine label, and for me to write detailed notes when I wax lyrical over a particularly memorable wine. On the other hand, the book should be small enough to carry easily. The binding needs to be tough enough so that it can stretch without disentegrating when wine labels are glued inside.

I settled on the present design. It is a traditionally bound hardback book with a cover of tanned goatskin. There are endpapers of blue-grey handmade ragpaper and 190 pages (95 double page spreads) of ivory cartridge paper. The paper will not shrivel and shrink when you glue wine labels to it, and will not ‘bleed’ when you write on it with ink.

The front cover is embossed with LIBRO di VINI or IN VINO VERITAS, according to your choice. It is also available to order without an embossed title.