The wine industry is the perfect mix between tradition and innovation. Making wine without some foundation in tradition seems just as absurd as moving forward in the industry without innovation, and the wine industry, in most cases, has never shied away from technological innovations for its own advancement and perseverance. Already widespread throughout the industry is the beneficial use of technology to prepare for and respond to implications of climate change as well as data collection in the vineyard to help growers and producers make more informed decisions. However, is there a threat that technology, namely Artificial Intelligence (AI), will replace people in the industry altogether, specifically sommeliers?
There are undoubtedly many implications of AI for the wine industry. From consumer to grower to producer to rater – no one will be unaffected. Already affected is the sommelier. Tech companies such as BottleBird, powered by Tastry, and WineCab, and their use of the virtual sommelier demonstrate just how much data that a machine can process in comparison to a human. Long story short: a human could never keep up.
Chemistry grad Katerina Axelsson founded startup Tastry after finding that wine analysis was too subjective and consistently inconsistent. She set out to gather more objective data by using analytical chemistry instead of human senses. She analyzed flavor profiles, developed a new chemistry methodology for tasting, and then taught a computer how to taste using machine learning and statistical methods. The result is BottleBird, a wine recommendation app. Tastry can be used by individual consumers to find their next favourite bottle; by winemakers to analyze their wines to predict market performance and customer satisfaction with their products; and by retailers to determine what customers want to buy and to increase sales. There is currently talk within the company of moving next to perfumes and coffee. As for sommeliers, Axelsson says they cannot be replaced by computers, but that this technology allows for more analysis than a human could ever undertake.
WineCab is a company founded by a man wishing to bring automation and industrial robotics a little closer to home. Mark Chaney developed a way to mix his passions for robotics, wine and AI while recovering from a serious illness. His development, simply put, is both a storage system for and an inventory of your collection, with a robotic arm and an AI-powered virtual sommelier that analytically and physically chooses your wine for you based on what you are in the mood for, in your own custom-built storage area. The system tracks the movement of bottles in and out of your collection and offers food pairings for each bottle. Instead of his innovation replacing the sommelier, Chaney thinks his product can bring sommeliers closer to the community. He says, “There is a disconnect in most communities between sommeliers and wine lovers. Most people will use a sommelier’s services in a restaurant, but never at home. We’re changing that completely. We don’t hope to replace the sommelier. We hope to build stronger relationships that never existed before.”
The sheer difference is the amount of data these technologies can process. In comparison to the sommelier, WineCab can track data for up to 600,000 wines.
Of course, these are just two innovators trying to change the world of wine. There are many more and the AI world is probably moving far beyond simply recommending wines and suggesting food pairings. It remains to be seen how much technology and artificial knowledge the wine world is willing to absorb. kw
