Pam Dillon, Co-Founder, Wine Ring
Remember when you first started tasting wine? I mean really taste. When instinctively you knew how much acidity or tannin a wine had. When you could taste the nature of the fruit. When finally, you could sense where the grapes were grown.
Now imagine one million of you, tasting wine
There are about a million wines in the world. No matter how many wines you taste every year, it’s not possible to taste each one. What if you could use your phone to taste a million wines? Turns out you can, more or less.
People and machines have begun to evolve together, and the future belongs to those who combine human expertise with the power of technology. Wine experts, especially sommeliers, will become ever more valuable in this brave, new world.
No longer is artificial intelligence or machine learning considered the province of academics. Soon every technology is going to be intelligent – and most technologies will do things that you can’t, or don’t want to.
You may wonder how technologies like these could possibly work with wine. Turns out they’re already starting to come alive, and come to market. Indeed, the best are being built by those people in the wine industry who understand how to use technology to deliver a better wine experience.
How could it be otherwise? Wine has a certain emotional character that eludes machines, but doesn’t elude people. Even the most sophisticated technology will require people to bring it to life, since fundamentally speaking, wine is sensory – and it is people who perceive it.
