January 29 2010
Odds and ends from a life lived through the prism of the wine glass …
Nipping it in the Bud
The over/under betting line on how soon an online wine writer will wax philosophic and draw an analogy in between the new Apple iPad and wine is set at three days. This earnest soul, our online wine writer, his proverbial skirt still blown upward from Steve Jobs’ hyperbolic presentation on Wednesday, will say that the iPad has an opportunity to “change the game” for the wine-interested.
This writer will urge us to ponder the possibilities: How amazing it would be to deliver applications and wine books in an elegant, interactive way that is portable.
Or, perhaps, this intrepid writer will suggest that using an iPad to deliver multimedia wine content within the context of a gargantuan wine list at a restaurant is a smart solution to an age old problem.
All of these circumstances could be true. Or, not. Or, not right now.
I say: don’t believe the hype.
Almost three years ago, I wrote about a company called Vinio that had a similar solution in providing an interactive tablet for diners at restaurants – a virtual Sommelier of sorts that could provide region, varietal, food pairing matches and a host of other value-added types of contextual information.
While pragmatic at the time, I also displayed a touch of the, “consider the possibilities” wide-eyed optimism.
Today, ahem, the Vinio site appears as if it hasn’t been updated in two years.
My point is – it’s been tried before. Sometimes old wine in new bottles is still old wine.
Automated Tasting Notes
In 2006 there was a buzz rippling in the burgeoning online wine community about a piece of Japanese technology dubbed the Robo-Sommelier.
As reported by the BBC at the time, Japanese technology manufacturer NEC developed a two foot tall robot that could “taste” and identify types of wine using infrared light to identify different flavor components. Eventually, this robot could be personalized to make wine recommendations for its owner based on their palate preferences.
Now, of course, this is well and good and a little bit like Popular Science magazine articles from the 70s that talked about flying cars in the new millennium. Yet, there is something interesting here, particularly when combined with another developing technology called Stats Monkey.
A developing technology from a research lab at Northwestern University, Stats Monkey can create computer-generated baseball stories.
From the web site:
Imagine that you could push a button, and magically create a story about a baseball game. That’s what the Stats Monkey system does. Given information commonly available online about many games—the box score and the play-by-play—the system automatically generates the text of a story about that game that captures the overall dynamic of the game and highlights the key plays and key players. The story includes an appropriate headline and a photo of the most important player in the game.
Hmmm …
What’s interesting about this is not its use for writing little league baseball stories for a local audience, as reported by NPR. Instead, the interesting thing is its ability to take information from a set of parameters and accurately construct a story—across a range of disciplines.
Also from the web site:
The applicability technology underlying the Stats Monkey system scopes across any sport or event in which the events produce significant quantitative data. It also has applications in domains in which recurring story types that are primarily data-driven, including other kinds of sports stories and many kinds of business stories such as quarterly or annual earnings stories, market updates, and so on. The Machine Generated Sports Stories system could be employed by news organizations or directly by organizations which wish to publish information about their activities, such as college sports teams or businesses.
Ultimately, the system can be extended to generate stories that include quotes from individuals or organizations involved in those stories (when those quotes are available online) as well as stories in different narrative styles for different audiences.
Hmmm …, again. What niche relies on quantitative data (scores) that can be combined with quotes for different narrative styles?
Forget the “wisdom of the crowds” when it comes to tasting notes. A far more interesting story to me is a robotic tasting element and an automated wine review story generator.
We think major wine critics have their panties in a bunch now? Sounds like we should just wait a couple of years …
Posted in, The Week in Wine. Permalink | Comments (4) |
Sign me up. Instead of tasting four or five thousands wines a year, I can feed them to my robot and get my magazine published by a push of a button. I just hope that the robot’s spell checker is better than my computer’s.
Richard—thanks for the comment. Good point on going to retail. In my experience—retailers definitely discourage the use of phones to price check in stores. It’ll be interesting to see how it all unfolds.
Charlie—yeah. that’ll be the day, right? We should all hold our breath for a robot taster and automatic writer. One thing it won’t have is a reputation based on personality (or bias) ...
Thanks for commenting guys ...
Jeff
Who says prices have to be available? I’m just looking for something that has all the pertinent information about a wine that won’t fit onto the front or back label. Maybe throw in a tasting note if the store manager has tasted the wine, special pricing, scores if available, etc. I often like to see what the grape blend is on a certain wine, and my only source oftentimes is the internet. Plus, most stores don’t have free wifi, so I’m standing there looking like a moron punching stuff into my phone, and waiting an eternity for it to download (this is all assuming the website doesn’t use Flash and I can actually see the site). To have all that information in a compact database on a local wifi network would be a godsend.
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“Or, perhaps, this intrepid writer will suggest that using an iPad to deliver multimedia wine content within the context of a gargantuan wine list at a restaurant is a smart solution to an age old problem.”
Aureole in Vegas has something very similar to this. Although I think the ipad would be a good platform for that, the lack of a camera and the inability to support Flash will hinder that.
I’m waiting for the day when I can go to my local store, tablet in hand, and roam the store, looking for nothing in particular, or get recommendations depending on the occasion. Link every bottle to a unique ID#, punch in the number, and get all kinds of information at your fingertips. I think that day is coming very, very soon.