A tasting note is yours until you press Save, and its audience is yours to choose. This page covers the three boundaries: when a note is stored, who can see it, and what guests can do without an account.
Saving Is Explicit
While a note is open, your selections live in the builder — updating the summary cards and coverage indicators as you work — and nothing reaches your tasting library until you press Save. There is no background autosave: a note is either saved, deliberately, or not yet a note.
The builder guards the boundary for you. Navigate away inside the app with meaningful changes pending and Curate interposes a warning, with Save & Leave offered as a single step; close the browser tab instead and the browser's own leave-page warning takes over. Either way, losing work takes intent.
Once saved, the note lands on its wine's page and in your tasting library. Reopen it to edit any time; edits follow the same rule — held in the builder until saved again. (Blind tasting notes are the one exception: they seal at save — see the FAQ.)
Who Sees What
A note carries two registers of prose — Personal Notes, never shown to anyone, and a Public Review, written to be shared — and the note itself has a visibility, chosen from the shield control beside Save:
Account Default — the standing choice; notes left here are shared, appearing with your review on the wine's page for members and guests alike.
Only Me — entirely yours, visible only in your own library and viewer.
Curate Members — shared with signed-in members, but not with signed-out visitors.
Public — shared with everyone the wine's page reaches.
Everyday notes are shared unless you narrow them — the library is a commons, and notes on a wine's page are much of its value — while Personal Notes stay private in every case, whatever the note's visibility. Blind tasting sessions are the mirror image: always private to you, with no visibility control at all. Sharing is per note, so a library can be nine parts private diary, one part published criticism, in whatever mix suits you.
Trying the Builder as a Guest
Signed-out visitors can open the tasting note builder and use it in full preview — every card, slider, and descriptor. The one thing a guest can't do is save; the builder says so plainly:
"You can explore the tasting note builder below, but your selections won’t be saved. Sign up for a free Curate account to keep track of wines you’ve tasted and what you thought of them."
Guest previews also leave out the personal touches an account provides — autocomplete for tasting partners, tags, and locations draws on your own history, which a guest doesn't yet have. Creating the free account is the whole fix. See Your First Tasting Note for the signed-in walk.
Candidates browsing the blind tasting formats have a parallel arrangement — unentitled exam formats open as demos, explorable but unsaved. See About Curate for Sommeliers.
Deleting a Note
A saved note can be deleted from its viewer by its owner, behind a confirmation. Deletion is then immediate and there's no wastebasket to fish it back from — the unsaved-changes guard protects work in progress, not second thoughts.