🍷 AI now understands wine

A team of scientists from Portugal, France, Switzerland, and the US have trained an algorithm to trace wines to their origins. The AI processed information about the chemicals in wines, identified their formulas, and built a scheme with similar wines grouped into clusters. To the scientists' surprise, the clusters’ positions mirrored the locations of estates where the wines were from.

After analyzing 80 wines from 12 vintages harvested from 1990 to 2007 at seven estates in the Bordeaux region of France, the AI "guessed" the place of production with over 99% accuracy and correctly identified the vintage in 50% of cases.

Why does this discovery matter?

📌 Thanks to AI tools, winemakers will have a quick way to detect fraud (fake wines are responsible for €3 billion in lost sales annually in Europe alone).

📌 AI sommeliers can be used for quality control in wine production.

📌 Digital olfaction — the fast-growing area of AI — will be able to enrich the wine experience and help train sommeliers and wine enthusiasts.

We could use machine learning to figure out how to blend wines to optimize quality. Having tools like this would make it much cheaper to make great blends, which would benefit everybody, — Alexandre Pouget, a neuroscience professor at the University of Geneva in Switzerland.

How does the wine industry already use AI?

📌 In Napa Valley, AI-powered sensors installed in the vineyards collect and analyze massive amounts of data on vines, soil moisture, sunlight exposure, temperature, and nutrient levels and suggest irrigation and harvest times.

📌 Some wineries in Bordeaux employ AI-powered robots. They fertilize the soil, remove weeds, and harvest the crops.

📌 Researchers from Denmark and California analyzed thousands of consumer reviews and other data and developed an AI to predict individual wine preferences accurately.

What do you think about the idea of a robot sommelier?

🔥 — I'm all for it
🙈 — some things are better left to humans

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