OLD AND BUSTED: ChatGPT.
The New Hotness? ChatVSOP! Meet my snooty AI sommelier. Like many wine drinkers, my family and I are taking notes from Claude.
These days, I am not the only one turning to Daddy AI for wine advice. The New York Times recently ran a piece on the customers consulting chatbots in restaurants, so they know where to start with terrifying wine lists. Sommeliers, for their part, are largely delighted about this development. “People making the conscious effort with AI, it means they’re curious, and that makes me happy,” said Claudia Rossellini, wine director of the restaurant Bavel in Los Angeles.
Meanwhile, the internet abounds with techy types bragging about online cellars coded by AI. “How I Built an 80,000-Line Open Source Wine Cellar App in 6 Weeks with Claude,” is a typical headline, in this case by one Johan Eklund of “wine cellar management” app Cellarion. Reddit is also full of happy AI users for wine help. “I know almost nothing about wine,” writes one. “Rather than get the same bottle of Pinot Noir over and over, I tell Claude what I am having and it gives me a few good suggestions!”
To wit: my parents and I decided to find out what our Claude “sommelier” could teach us. To do so, we peered at a collection of bottles kindly made for the taking by the daughter of my late great-aunt, a glamorous, chain-smoking, Vienna-born mother of two. Where to start?
Hope pulsed as it does. Should we go with the 1982 Bouchard Père & Fils Meursault? Pictures were uploaded to Claude; the response was extensive and damning.
Claude took one look at the color and declared it was oxidized, which happens when wine is stored at “too warm a temperature.” The wine would then “taste flat, nutty, and vinegary – not pleasant.”
I’ve used ChatGPT a few times on my iPhone when shopping the wine departments at H-E-B and its Trader Joe’s inspired spinoff, Central Market. I uploaded photos of the bottles on the shelf, it OCRed the text on the labels and gave me descriptions of each type of Chablis, until it described the last one as “Ahh, Jean-Marc Brocard Sainte-Claire Chablis 2024 — now we’re talking. This one is a serious reference-point Chablis…If you’re choosing one bottle and want the most true Chablis experience from this shelf: Jean-Marc Brocard Sainte-Claire is the pick.”
I don’t know if it’s one “serious reference-point Chablis” — but it wasn’t bad at all.