Will AI Replace Wine Criticism?

Originally published at Three Quarks Daily. In World of Fine Wine, Master of Wine Benjamin Lewin speculates about whether AI could replace human-generated wine criticism. He acknowledges the obvious limitation: “A chatbot cannot smell or taste.” Yet he thinks this may not matter. Wine, after all, consists of measurable properties. The intensity of color and its wavelength can be specified. Labs can analyze acidity, sugar, alcohol, viscosity, and volatile compounds with far more precision than the human palate. Feed those measurements into an AI trained on the enormous archive of published tasting notes and scores, Lewin argues, and the machine could spit out the patterns linking chemical composition to human judgment about taste. Impressions would be replaced by actual measurement, he suggests. Eventually, what he calls “a self-driving laboratory” (analogous to a self-driving car) might generate tasting notes, predict aging, adopt different critical “personas,” and achieve “greater…