Walking into even the smallest wine store, or perusing the shortest wine list at a local restaurant, can be daunting. How are you supposed to pick one bottle from the many choices? What the hell does “Brunello di Montalcino” mean? And when do people who seem to know about wine find time for all of this stuff?
Some people are inclined to answer all those questions. (Carefully, it’s an Italian wine, and stuffed into the crevices in their lives like the bottles they have stashed in every nook and cranny in their homes.) Others might want to use an app like Wine Ring, which debuted this week, to get recommendations based on their preferences.
A screenshot of Wine Ring’s app making a recommendation based on your taste preferences.
Wine Ring claims to have created an app that can guess how much you’ll like a wine based on your ratings — on a scale from “Love It to Dislike It,” which is apparently unique enough to warrant a trademark — of what you drank before. You know how Netflix recommends movies based on the ratings you give to films you’ve already seen? Wine Ring is like that, but for fermented grape juice.
There are a slew of other wine-related apps available: Delectable is basically a social network where wine lovers don’t have to worry about being called snobs by their Two-Buck Chuck-guzzling friends, Vivino is a cellar management tool and a rating system, review app Corkz, wine search service Plonk, and so on and so forth. Wine Ring aims to be different.
“Wine Ring’s technology is fundamentally different from any other wine app, and for that matter any consumer app,” says Pam Dillon, the company’s chief executive. “We’ve solved the problem of consumer preference, and can deliver a whole range of novel recommendation functionalities either in the context of the world of wine, or on an inventory-specific basis.”
The company has been granted several patents for the systems it has developed to power its app, and Dillon says it will make its money by selling aggregate data to retailers and restaurateurs. The idea is that businesses will learn more about wine drinkers, which will help them sell more wine, at least in theory.
“The entire wine industry supply chain – producers, importers, distributers, retailers and restaurateurs – knows what is bought and sold, but it doesn’t know what is preferred, and in what market it is preferred,” Dillon says. “Aggregate preference data creates the opportunity for much more efficient production, and much happier consumers.”
I’m not convinced Wine Ring will lead to reputable producers or importers changing their decisions, nor that they should. Part of wine’s appeal is that the best examples are true to where the grapes that were sacrificed to make it were grown. Some people like manufactured, reliable wines; others like the variety that makes every wine, or indeed every bottle, different from its shelf-mates.
That might be the thing that makes me most skeptical about Wine Ring, actually. Recommending a wine is hard, and because there can be significant amounts of bottle variation, even a single wine can defy expectations. (Hence “There are no great old wines, only great bottles.” You can nix the “old.”) The app has no way of knowing how well a particular bottle has fared, and it only takes one corked wine to make people distrust a recommendation tool like this.
It’s similar to the problem Netflix encounters in making its recommendations. Does it have a good idea of what people like to watch? Sure. But there’s no accounting for taste — and when someone’s literal tastebuds are involved, it becomes even harder to know what they’ll like. Wine Ring can’t be perfect.
Still, it could be good enough. Sometimes people don’t want to have to guess what they might like to try, and they don’t want to ask anyone else for help. A recommendations tool like this can make their life easier, more comfortable, and less stressful whenever they have to pick a bottle of wine. If those people are willing to drink a few duds and forgive the app, it’ll be just fine for them.
As for me? I’ll try to figure out what I like the old-fashioned way — by drinking every bottle I can get my hands on. It’s time to really put this liver to work.
‘Wine Ring’ app removes some stress from wine buying originally published by Gigaom, © copyright 2015.
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