Field Notes from a Wine Life – Then and Now Edition

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 …