by Dwight Furrow
In World of Fine Wine, Master of Wine Benjamin Lewin speculates about whether AI could replace human-generated wine criticism. He acknowledges the obvious limitation: “A chatbot cannot smell or taste.” Yet he thinks this may not matter. Wine, after all, consists of measurable properties. The intensity of color and its wavelength can be specified. Labs can analyze acidity, sugar, alcohol, viscosity, and volatile compounds with far more precision than the human palate. Feed those measurements into an AI trained on the enormous archive of published tasting notes and scores, Lewin argues, and the machine could spit out the patterns linking chemical composition to human judgment about taste. Impressions would be replaced by actual measurement, he suggests. Eventually, what he calls “a self-driving laboratory” (analogous to a self-driving car) might generate tasting notes, predict aging, adopt different critical “personas,” and achieve “greater objectivity than any single human expert.”
Common sense might suggest that the fact that an LLM cannot smell or taste should end the discussion. But that limitation does not harm Lewin’s argument. His point is that an LLM, supplied with laboratory data along with the vast archive of online tasting notes, could accurately predict what informed tasters would find in a wine. An AI that can reliably predict what expert tasters would report would be functionally equivalent to what actual tasters discover.
I do not think we can dismiss this speculation out of hand. Read more »
Wine tasting is a great seducer for those with an analytic cast of mind. No other beverage has attracted such elaborate taxonomies: geographical classifications, wine variety classifications, quality classifications, aroma wheels, mouthfeel wheels, and numerical scores. To taste wine, in this dominant model, is to decode—to fix a varietal essence, to pin down terroir as if it were a stable identity, to judge typicity (i.e. its conformity to a norm) as though it were the highest aesthetic ideal. The rhetoric of mastery in wine culture depends on this illusion of stability: Cabernet must show cassis and graphite, Riesling must taste of petrol and lime, terroir speaks in a singular tongue waiting to be translated.
If there is one commonly held “truth” that governs conventional wisdom about wine tasting, it is that wine tasting is thoroughly subjective. We all have different preferences, unique wine tasting histories, and different sensory thresholds for detecting aromatic compounds. One person’s scintillating Burgundian Pinot Noir is another person’s thin, weedy plonk. But this “truth” is at best an oversimplification; like a very good Pinot Noir, matters are more complex.
The evidence that pairing music with wine can enhance one’s tasting experience continues to mount since