Will AI make it easier to choose the best wine?

As in almost every part of our lives, AI will certainly change how we buy wine. In fact, wine is an ideal candidate: it is a complicated drink, and many consumers find it difficult to navigate their way around the endless array of bottles, many with names that are difficult to decipher.

AI works by scraping all of the information or data it can find, so it will be able to harvest the descriptions, tasting notes and other information on every wine that makes an appearance online or in a book. We are only at the start of this phenomenon but AI can only be as good as the information it feeds on, which can be limited or out of date. At the moment, not all retailers list their wines online, some of which are unique to them. For instance, because they’re not on its website, neither Claude.ai nor ChatGPT were able to tell me which wines Marks & Spencer sells in Ireland. Claude included a quote from something I wrote a long time ago.

Updating a list of wines, adding new lines and changing prices can take a huge amount of time, and not everyone has the resources to do so. In order to maximise AI’s usefulness in wine, the customer will have to provide information on what sort of wine they like as well as their dislikes, the kind of food they like and the price they want to pay for a bottle of wine.

Once it has this information, AI promises to be able to create a bespoke selection of wine that changes as the consumer moves from one retail outlet to another. It should, in theory, be able to find the best price for a particular wine and locate any wine available on the open market.

One AI platform I came across recently was Askjancis. I subscribe to JancisRobinson.com mainly because it give me access to the Oxford Companion to Wine, a very useful research tool on everything related to wine. For an annual fee of £99 (€116), I can also see tasting notes and scores, and articles, including those Robinson has written for the Financial Times. Recently, the site launched AskJancis, its official AI wine assistant.

AskJancis, we are told, is “your digital wine assistant and discovery tool for JancisRobinson.com”.

It says: “I can guide you through reviews, articles and producer insights so we find what suits your taste.”

As the website contains 279,000 wine reviews and scores, 23,000 producer profiles, 15,000 articles and 4,500 Oxford Companion entries, it has plenty of data to mine. Topics it promises to cover include the above, as well as visits to wine regions, restaurant wine list analysis and recommendations, wine news and much more. The downside is you have to be a subscriber.

It is also argued that the quality of wine will improve with the help of AI as it can use data to help maximise the potential of everything from the vineyard to the finished bottle. A producer with data on weather, soils, grape varieties, surrounding vineyards, winemaking methods, prices, popularity and profitability will certainly be better placed to run a successful business.