{"id":75087,"date":"2026-06-16T04:49:10","date_gmt":"2026-06-16T04:49:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/75087\/"},"modified":"2026-06-16T04:49:10","modified_gmt":"2026-06-16T04:49:10","slug":"meet-my-snooty-ai-sommelier","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/75087\/","title":{"rendered":"Meet my snooty AI sommelier"},"content":{"rendered":"

My grandparents\u2019 home was a proper house, on the cusp of the Hampstead Heath Extension, with roses and flagstones at the front. It was the sort that looked like it housed a robust wine collection \u2013 solid on account of good, aged European bottles, bought at a time when standards were, one assumes, higher.\u00a0<\/p>\n

There was one bottle in my grandfather\u2019s possession that came with particular fanfare: a 1974 Bordeaux whose label was so far gone you couldn\u2019t see exactly what it was. As a treat, I arranged to have the sommelier of the Connaught Hotel examine and open it. Once the cork gave way, a thud of brown sediment rocked the bottle. It was decanted and it breathed \u2013 inasmuch as a long-dead thing can breathe. Still hopeful, we tried the sherry-looking stuff \u2013 and it was nasty.<\/p>\n

Clearly old and French had been mistaken for good \u2013 by both myself and my grandpa. But if you do want to be sure you aren\u2019t sitting on a lucky gem these days, it\u2019s wise to get Claude involved.\u00a0<\/p>\n

These days, I am not the only one turning to Daddy AI for wine advice. The New York Times recently ran a piece<\/a> 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. \u2018People making the conscious effort with AI, it means they\u2019re curious, and that makes me happy,\u2019 said Claudia Rossellini, wine director of the restaurant Bavel in Los Angeles.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the internet abounds with techy types bragging about online cellars coded by AI. \u2018How I Built an 80,000-Line Open Source Wine Cellar App in 6 Weeks with Claude,\u2019 is a typical headline<\/a>, in this case by one Johan Eklund of \u2018wine cellar management\u2019 app Cellarion. Reddit is also full of happy AI users for wine help. \u2018I know almost nothing about wine,\u2019 writes one. \u2018Rather 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!\u2019<\/p>\n

To wit: my parents and I decided to find out what our Claude \u2018sommelier\u2019 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?<\/p>\n

Hope pulsed as it does. Should we go with the 1982 Bouchard P\u00e8re & Fils Meursault? Pictures were uploaded to Claude; the response was extensive and damning.<\/p>\n

If you do want to be sure you aren\u2019t sitting on a lucky gem these days, it\u2019s wise to get AI involved<\/p>\n

Claude took one look at the colour and declared it was oxidised, which happens when wine is stored at \u2018too warm a temperature\u2019. The wine would then \u2018taste flat, nutty, and vinegary \u2013 not pleasant\u2019.<\/p>\n

Fair enough. I don\u2019t think anyone in my extended family, yours truly included, has any means of storing wine that would stave off oxidisation. But, even if my great-aunt had got the storage right, we\u2019d still be in trouble. \u2018At 44 years old, even a perfectly stored Meursault would be at or past its peak,\u2019 ribbeted the jocular, knowing Claude. \u2018White Burgundies, even great ones, rarely reward this kind of ageing unless stored in near-perfect cellar conditions (around 12\u00b0C, stable, dark, and on its side).\u2019\u00a0<\/p>\n

Based on this information, we put it in the fridge, and then began to examine a red Bordeaux from 1972 whose label \u2013 simply by dint of looking old, and having some cursive script \u2013 made us think that perhaps here was a winner. But Claude took one look and said the bottle we were now contemplating was actually vomited out from what is \u2018widely regarded as the worst vintage of the entire decade across France. A cold, wet summer and poor harvest conditions resulted in thin, acidic, unripe wines in both Bordeaux and Burgundy\u2019. To sum up? \u2018Most bottles are best forgotten at this point even if you stumbled across one.\u2019<\/p>\n

We then found out we didn\u2019t have a bottle opener, so the horror red and the nasty, oxidised Meursault would have to wait. We turned our attention to the screw-top contingent of the cupboard instead and found \u2013 and finally, I wasn\u2019t remotely surprised \u2013 that the mid-1990s Banrock Station Merlot and the mass-produced Mouton Rothschild from the same decade were probably equally crap.<\/p>\n

Claude sneered that if we had to, we should try the Banrock Station \u2013 adding that within a ten-minute walk and for \u00a310 we could come away with a far better option. Thanks for that, Claude. We opened the Banrock, and my mother \u2013 who hates waste and has even more of a contrarian spirit than I do \u2013 said it was nice. It wasn\u2019t: it tasted of detergent.<\/p>\n

My evening of wine fails lorded over by the insouciant yet eager Claude has confirmed two things. One: AI isn\u2019t entirely useless. And two: when you inherit a wine collection from a person who saw out almost all of the 20th century, don\u2019t get your hopes up. You can either get Claude to break the truth to you or you can do it the hard way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"My grandparents\u2019 home was a proper house, on the cusp of the Hampstead Heath Extension, with roses and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":75088,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[24,53,3154,182,3044],"class_list":["post-75087","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-anthropic","tag-ai","tag-anthropic","tag-anthropic-claude","tag-claude","tag-wine"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75087","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=75087"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75087\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/75088"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75087"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75087"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75087"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}