My grandparents’ home was a proper house, on the cusp of the Hampstead Heath Extension, with roses and flagstones at the front. It was the sort that looked like it housed a robust wine collection – solid on account of good, aged European bottles, bought at a time when standards were, one assumes, higher.
There was one bottle in my grandfather’s possession that came with particular fanfare: a 1974 Bordeaux whose label was so far gone you couldn’t see exactly what it was. As a treat, I arranged to have the sommelier of the Connaught Hotel examine and open it. Once the cork gave way, a thud of brown sediment rocked the bottle. It was decanted and it breathed – inasmuch as a long-dead thing can breathe. Still hopeful, we tried the sherry-looking stuff – and it was nasty.
Clearly old and French had been mistaken for good – by both myself and my grandpa. But if you do want to be sure you aren’t sitting on a lucky gem these days, it’s wise to get Claude involved.
These days, I am not the only one turning to Daddy AI for wine advice. The New York Times recently ran a piece on the customers consulting chatbots in restaurants, so they know where to start with terrifying wine lists. Sommeliers, for their part, are largely delighted about this development. ‘People making the conscious effort with AI, it means they’re curious, and that makes me happy,’ said Claudia Rossellini, wine director of the restaurant Bavel in Los Angeles.
Meanwhile, the internet abounds with techy types bragging about online cellars coded by AI. ‘How I Built an 80,000-Line Open Source Wine Cellar App in 6 Weeks with Claude,’ is a typical headline, in this case by one Johan Eklund of ‘wine cellar management’ app Cellarion. Reddit is also full of happy AI users for wine help. ‘I know almost nothing about wine,’ writes one. ‘Rather than get the same bottle of Pinot Noir over and over, I tell Claude what I am having and it gives me a few good suggestions!’
To wit: my parents and I decided to find out what our Claude ‘sommelier’ could teach us. To do so, we peered at a collection of bottles kindly made for the taking by the daughter of my late great-aunt, a glamorous, chain-smoking, Vienna-born mother of two. Where to start?
Hope pulsed as it does. Should we go with the 1982 Bouchard Père & Fils Meursault? Pictures were uploaded to Claude; the response was extensive and damning.
If you do want to be sure you aren’t sitting on a lucky gem these days, it’s wise to get AI involved
Claude took one look at the colour and declared it was oxidised, which happens when wine is stored at ‘too warm a temperature’. The wine would then ‘taste flat, nutty, and vinegary – not pleasant’.
Fair enough. I don’t think anyone in my extended family, yours truly included, has any means of storing wine that would stave off oxidisation. But, even if my great-aunt had got the storage right, we’d still be in trouble. ‘At 44 years old, even a perfectly stored Meursault would be at or past its peak,’ ribbeted the jocular, knowing Claude. ‘White Burgundies, even great ones, rarely reward this kind of ageing unless stored in near-perfect cellar conditions (around 12°C, stable, dark, and on its side).’
Based on this information, we put it in the fridge, and then began to examine a red Bordeaux from 1972 whose label – simply by dint of looking old, and having some cursive script – made us think that perhaps here was a winner. But Claude took one look and said the bottle we were now contemplating was actually vomited out from what is ‘widely regarded as the worst vintage of the entire decade across France. A cold, wet summer and poor harvest conditions resulted in thin, acidic, unripe wines in both Bordeaux and Burgundy’. To sum up? ‘Most bottles are best forgotten at this point even if you stumbled across one.’
We then found out we didn’t have a bottle opener, so the horror red and the nasty, oxidised Meursault would have to wait. We turned our attention to the screw-top contingent of the cupboard instead and found – and finally, I wasn’t remotely surprised – that the mid-1990s Banrock Station Merlot and the mass-produced Mouton Rothschild from the same decade were probably equally crap.
Claude sneered that if we had to, we should try the Banrock Station – adding that within a ten-minute walk and for £10 we could come away with a far better option. Thanks for that, Claude. We opened the Banrock, and my mother – who hates waste and has even more of a contrarian spirit than I do – said it was nice. It wasn’t: it tasted of detergent.
My evening of wine fails lorded over by the insouciant yet eager Claude has confirmed two things. One: AI isn’t entirely useless. And two: when you inherit a wine collection from a person who saw out almost all of the 20th century, don’t get your hopes up. You can either get Claude to break the truth to you or you can do it the hard way.
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