In the Bay Area — ground zero of the AI boom, where nearly half of San Francisco’s roughly 500 billboards belong to artificial intelligence companies and a growing subset of people are outsourcing as many decisions to AI as possible in the hopes of getting to the future first — it’s hardly surprising that diners are using AI chatbots, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, to make their wine selections in restaurants.
David Castleberry, sommelier at Mediterranean restaurant Eos & Nyx in San Jose, said he sees a diner using AI to choose a wine off his list “every other night, if not once a night.” It picks up, he said, when a big tech conference is in the area, such as Nvidia GTC, a global conference for AI developers that took place in San Jose in March.
Wine drinkers have been using technology to guide their buying decisions for years. There are plenty of apps, like Vivino, that analyze a user’s purchase history and preferences to make recommendations. From that perspective, chatbots are simply the latest tool — and according to a recent survey of U.S. wine drinkers from industry researcher Wine Opinions, 25% of respondents have used them at least once to choose wine.
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But there has suddenly been a lot of existentialist-tinged wine industry discourse about them: The New York Times declared that “AI is coming for the sommeliers.” Given that “AI can’t taste,” Bon Appétit asked, “Why do people let it pick their wine?” In an Instagram post, a sommelier who said they work at a Michelin-starred restaurant in New York City called it “crushing” when guests ask “the little robot in (their) phone” when she’s “studied this s— for years.”
The consensus is that diners are using AI because wine often feels impenetrable: They’re overwhelmed by vast or esoteric wine lists, or simply embarrassed to ask questions. Yet Castleberry offered another theory about the shift: It shows that the decades-long stigma against the sommelier prevails. “The idea of the pretentious jerky somm is a real bummer. I personally have seen and worked with people constantly pushing big bottles and price points, and not listening to what the guest wants,” he said. “Maybe with a chatbot, people worry less about the agenda.”
The consensus is that diners are using AI because they’re overwhelmed by vast or esoteric wine lists, or simply embarrassed to ask questions. Some restaurants are responding by featuring shorter lists. Pictured: the wine list at Lord Stanley, now closed, in San Francisco in 2019.
Scott Strazzante/The Chronicle
Laurel Livezey, head sommelier at Healdsburg vegan marketplace Little Saint, said these “misconceptions” may have carried over from the ’90s and 2000s, when there was a “history of supplier relationships outweighing customer relationships,” which she thinks diluted trust in sommeliers. “This idea that we’re only there to make the big sale, to judge your wine preferences and tell you what you want to drink,” Livezey said, “that’s in the past.”
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Castleberry makes sure his list “has something for everyone” so he doesn’t “alienate” any customers. Many restaurants have also shifted to shorter wine lists to make the selection process less intimidating. But the increasing reliance on AI to navigate a wine list suggests bigger changes are needed to make wine more approachable.
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Zoltan Nagy, the general manager and wine director at Macarena in Palo Alto — the upscale Spanish tapas restaurant that hosted Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl afterparty — said he sees customers using chatbots once or twice a night. “They turn a page or two (of the wine list) and when they feel a little like, ‘Oh my God, I can’t understand anything,’ they pick up their phone, take a picture and have ChatGPT recommend a wine,” he said.
Noting that he has tasted more than 10,000 wines over the past five years, Nagy asked, “Why do you trust AI and not trust somebody who puts on a smile and tastes wine every day?”
Restaurant jobs are largely considered safe from AI; they require physical tasks, and for now, it’s more affordable to pay humans to bus tables than to purchase a robot. And while sommeliers do have some physical components to their job — including serving wine and stocking the cellar — their value lies in the knowledge they have accumulated through years of expensive study, tasting and testing. That knowledge is, to some degree, replaceable by AI.
But, sommeliers interviewed by the Chronicle argued, chatbots lack their ability to assemble an exciting, well-rounded wine list, which often entails procuring hard-to-find bottles through longstanding, personal relationships. A chatbot can pull tasting notes off the internet, but it can’t experience how particular vintages of a wine might taste differently. “I don’t know if AI will ever reach the depth of knowledge we get from tasting and experimenting, trying new things and getting creative with what we have at our disposal,” Livezey said.
Wines on display at the checkout counter in the wine retail section at Little Saint in Healdsburg in 2022.
Erik Castro/Special to The Chronicle
Castleberry said that there can be a disconnect between what a bot says will pair with a specific dish and the type of wine the person actually likes to drink — especially if the diner isn’t giving it “very specific parameters and prompts” to help it “dig deeper and understand your tastes.”
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“I’ve had a couple of incidents where people were like, ‘Ugh, that’s not really my style,’” he said.
Nagy has had similar experiences. “I have had guests say, ‘I don’t like the wine AI gave me,’” he said. “That’s why I’m here, that’s why I ask you questions about what you drink every day, about what you’re eating tonight. I’m not sure AI understands the guest and what they need.”
AI recommendations also tend to be quite basic: Castleberry said chatbots seem to almost always recommend an Italian wine to his diners, likely drawing from the Italian and Greek influences on the food menu.
“It’s way more simplistic,” Livezey said. “If I’m thinking oxidative Jura, (the chatbot) is typically giving me Chardonnay. It works, but it’s not the creativity I’m going for.”
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That said, she believes chatbots could act as support staff, helping bridge the gap between self-conscious drinkers and sommeliers. “If a recommendation from ChatGPT is the start of a conversation, who am I to judge that?” Livezey said. “If wine is being talked about and ordered, that excites me, period.”