Since the last blog post, the 2026 Grid Books have arrived and everyone we've heard from loves the improvements. (Those for whom the 2026es were their first Grid Book have issued the typical and always-encouraging "Wow! You have no idea how much I needed this!")
Let us review a bit more about the emendments and additions, starting from where the prior blog post left off:
The Viticulture section of the 2026 Grid Book is host to a few vineyard-ready augmentations. Aspect and Grade, instead of offering together a mere line for discursive inscription, are now circleable fields. Now one can quickly circle "SW" (i.e., "southwest") and "Sloped," rather than pen-in notes like "SW; sloped in foothill terrain." As discussed in "Part I," we have made every effort to remove friction associated with writing. While writing and thinking-while-writing are essential in any discipline of study, are integral to any evaluation of phenomena, Grid Books are optimized for wine professionals out in the field, people who are working, talking, playing, studying in company, evaluating wines on the fly and in circumstances that don't lend themselves to writing.
We have shrunken the Elevation field's scale somewhat, in favor of a new Winemaking field and an expanded Terroir Summary. As this modification demonstrates, not all fields lend themselves to circleability and selection-oriented scales. To wit, we were hesitant to pre-qualify winemaking techniques and methods. It is a broad field and could easily warrant its own Grid section per se on a differently-sized sheet of paper.
Moving down, the Short List and Verdict sections now have circleable fields, where we've listed common and oft-studied classifications relevant across various important viticultural regions.
Generally, these final three sections—Short List, Verdict, Reveal—have been tidied-up. Their first several fields have been standardized across all three sections (n.b. the orangey circles).
To the Reveal section we have added an open-text line for Producer and one for the Name of Wine. These will help guide the user more directedly than the formerly-lone Notes text-field, without prescribing over-specific criteria that can't apply to every bottle label.
As one learns in enology, in drinking and studying wine, most all wines have producer names and, sometimes, those producer names will also be the name of the wine (usually to occur by default, for a lack of naming associated with limited label-variety or flagshipping a bottle). In most cases, especially with prestige, exam-testable, and bio- and eco-sustainable wines, the name of the wine will not be a null category but will, rather, correspond with a lieu-dix, climat, site, vineyard, soil, bedrock, vine age, aging vessel, person, etc.—and some vignerons name wines like boat-buyers name boats. In any case, names associated wines deserve their own field away from the Producer field. Finally, the Grid now expressly invites one to note the price of the wine bottle-in-question, if deemed relevant.
Other than these changes to the Grid, the rest of the 2026 Grid Book remains much as the 2025, save a few corrections and additions to the Tasting Lexicon and Grape Index. As such, the ultimate Tasting Log, beginning on p. 292, remains ready for summary entries, so that Grid Book users may scan their year-in-wine at a glance.
If anyone has any quandaries or thoughts about this latest vintage of the SommPuzzles' Grid Book, do not hesitate to contact us.
Thanks for tasting and studying with SommPuzzles,
The SP Team
