I am a man who enjoys a glass of wine. 

‘A meal without wine is like a day without sunshine’, wrote that ever-quotable Roman Pliny the Elder, and although a nod to sensible health means I don’t entirely comply with that advice (I’ve never been one for breakfast anyway), I share the sentiment.

When I first started drinking wine, it was a drink shrouded in mystery. 

The wine trade was secretive, deliberately excluding those who didn’t belong to the ‘club’; sommeliers seemed to take pleasure in humiliating restaurant diners who didn’t have an encyclopaedic knowledge of the grape.

Fortunately, all that has changed.  This democratisation of wine was driven by the supermarkets, who realised that there was money to be made in helping the rest of us discover the joys of wine, and by wine writers such as Oz Clarke, who cut through the pretension and made us all realise that wine was something everybody could delight in.

In the early 1990s I decided I wanted to expand my wine knowledge, so embarked on a series of wine courses run by the Wine & Spirit Education Trust (WSET), whose ladder of qualifications culminates in the staggeringly difficult Master of Wine.  

It was when the teacher started lesson one by telling us that ‘the road to wine knowledge is littered with empty bottles’ that I realised I had at last found a lesson where I didn’t mind doing the homework.

This was before the days of the internet.  Nowadays those who want to know more about what is in their glass can access a staggeringly huge resource of knowledge at the touch of a button.  In a restaurant and see a grape variety on the wine list you don’t recognise?  Simply Google it.

So it was inevitable that someone would jump on the latest bandwagon – Artificial Intelligence (AI) – and try to harness it to tell us what wines we should be drinking.

As an aside, I don’t know if you have noticed, but those of a techie disposition seem to believe that AI is the answer to every single question, including many that have not been asked yet.  As a writer, I was interested to be given a demonstration of how ChatGPT could generate copy without the need for human intervention. 

It churned out text which was, to be fair, in coherent English (which is a big step forward for most techies, it’s true, so no wonder they are dazzled by AI). 

The fact that the copy was derivative, plagiaristic, banal and boring didn’t seem to be an issue for the geek who was showing me the technology.  As a writer, I was delighted; it would seem my livelihood is pretty safe, for the time being at least.

Anyway, back to wine.  The reason I bring up AI, is that on Monday a new app was unveiled which claims to use AI to pick wine for us, both from a supermarket shelf and a restaurant wine list.

Now, I am no Luddite.  Technology which provides information to help each of us make our own decisions can be invaluable.  But we are individuals, and no computer can know our own tastes, especially as these vary depending on our mood, the occasion, and the company we are keeping.

The world of wine is one of almost infinite variables: not just our own tastes and moods, but the ever-changing nature of wine itself.  Each vintage brings hundreds of thousands of new combinations of grapes, climate, wine-making technology and wine-maker’s individualism. 

Trying to narrow all of this down to a single, AI-driven solution is simply nonsense.

And anyway, the joy of wine is in discovery.  Yes, trying something new will occasionally end up in disappointment, but it can also lead you to new heights of bacchanalian joy you didn’t know existed.

If you want to find an interesting bottle to drink, my advice would be to find a good independent wine merchant (Norfolk has several), get to know them, and ask their advice. 

Let’s leave AI to undertake the ‘grunt’ tasks which no-one wants to do.  The joy of eating and drinking is in discovery, and that means trusting our own noses and taste buds, and not being afraid to try something new. 

Let the technology provide us with knowledge; when it comes to making the decisions about what we eat and drink, as long as AI cannot smell or taste (which it can’t), the human touch will always be superior.