No taste test needed as AI reviews wine

Full-bodied... a dark palate... a round finish... You’ve probably noticed the descriptions associated with a bottle of wine often use the same vocabulary.

This unique vocabulary has enabled researchers to create an algorithm capable of automatically generating reviews without any need for taste buds to get involved...

The Wine Advocate; Wine Enthusiast; Wine Spectator; Decanter... These are some of the top sources for getting the best advice when you’re looking to buy a bottle of wine.

These references spend a good part of the year tasting the latest wines in order to offer their readers a preview.

In short, there’s no better way to get advice on finding a wine you’ll like.

However, a new player has come onto the scene in the form of artificial intelligence (AI).

American researchers at Dartmouth College have developed technology capable of creating reviews for a bottle of wine or beer without any human involvement.

It is an algorithm based on 125 000 reviews, published in the renowned magazine Wine Enthusiast, and 143 000 others from the RateBeer website.

The results have been published in the International Journal of Research in Marketing.

And it’s an approach that could be applied to many other consumer products, such as coffee or even cars, says Scientific American magazine.

Participants in the study were unable to distinguish between reviews written by a human and those written by a machine.

Sommeliers can rest assured that this technology has its limits.

For instance, the algorithm is not yet capable of predicting how the aromatic profile of a wine evolves as it ages. For now taste buds remain the only tool for this type of information. –