The guy at the next table was holding his phone over the wine list like he was trying to defuse a bomb.
I watched him snap a photo, tap something, wait. His date watched too. She had that look women get when they realize the evening has already gone somewhere they didn’t want it to go. He nodded at his screen, smiled, pointed at something on the list with the confidence of a man who has just been told what to think by a machine.
“We’ll have the Côtes du Rhône,” he said to the server. Like he’d been drinking it his whole life.
Here’s what I know about wine: it should be red, it should be cheap enough that you don’t feel guilty pouring a second glass, and it should taste like something that grew in dirt, not a laboratory. That’s it. That’s my entire wine education, earned across thirty years of bad decisions in bars that didn’t have wine lists because the wine came in a box behind the counter.
But apparently that’s not good enough anymore. Apparently you need artificial intelligence to tell you what to drink with your salmon.
The New York Times ran a piece about people photographing wine lists and feeding them to ChatGPT. Asking the machine to pick something that pairs well with their entrée, something that’s a good value, something that won’t make them look stupid in front of the sommelier. One guy — builds AI systems at PricewaterhouseCoopers for a living — said it helps him “have a better conversation with the somm.”
A man who builds these systems can’t talk to another human being about wine without first consulting the machine he builds. That’s not a tool. That’s a prosthetic for a skill we used to call conversation.
I knew a bartender in San Pedro named Manny who could look at you for three seconds and know what you needed. Not what you wanted — what you needed. Sometimes it was bourbon. Sometimes it was a beer and ten minutes of silence. Once he poured me a glass of water and said, “You look like you’re about to do something stupid.” He was right. I was. He’d never heard of an algorithm. He’d heard of people.
That’s what a sommelier does, if they’re any good. They read the room. They notice you’re on a first date and maybe tonight isn’t the night for the forty-dollar gamble on natural wine from Slovenia. They see you’re celebrating and they find something with a story, something that makes the evening feel larger than itself. They ask what you’ve been drinking lately, and from your answer they build a map of who you are and where your palate wants to go.
The machine can cross-reference varietals and price points and vintage ratings. It can tell you the 2019 Châteauneuf-du-Pape is drinking well right now and pairs nicely with lamb. What it can’t do is notice that you’ve been staring at the Burgundy section with the look of a man who’s remembering something. It can’t ask “rough week?” and pour you something that tastes like forgiveness.
“It feels like a quiz you didn’t prepare for,” the PricewaterhouseCoopers guy said about choosing wine.
Yeah. So does talking to a stranger. So does falling in love. So does walking into a new city without a map. Socrates spent his whole life in conversations where nobody knew the answer going in. He thought that was the only kind worth having. I think he was onto something, but then again they killed him for it, so maybe the market has always preferred certainty.
Every time you let the machine decide — what to drink, what to read, where to eat, who to trust — you close a door you didn’t know was open. You miss the sommelier who would’ve pushed you toward something you’d never have chosen. You miss the bartender who says, “Trust me on this one.” You trade the risk of looking stupid for the certainty of never being surprised.
I’m sitting here with a glass of something a waitress recommended because I said, “I don’t know, what do you like?” She picked a Malbec from Argentina. It’s jammy and a little rough around the edges. Not what a machine would’ve chosen for me. It’s what a twenty-three-year-old working her way through nursing school and drinking wine on her nights off thought I’d enjoy. She was right. Her uncle has a ranch outside Mendoza. She went there once, with someone she doesn’t talk about anymore. There’s a whole life behind that recommendation. The machine would’ve given me an optimal pairing. She gave me a story.
The guy at the next table seems happy with his Côtes du Rhône. His date is looking at her phone now too. Two people, same table, same bottle, two different screens. The wine is fine. Everything is fine.
Somewhere in this city a sommelier is closing up, wiping down glasses, wondering if anyone tomorrow will let her do the thing she spent years learning to do.
Probably not. There’s an app for that now.