Like many people, Spencer Herbst finds choosing wines in restaurants to be stressful. He likes wine, he said, but considers himself relatively uninformed.
“It feels like a quiz you didn’t prepare for,” he said.
So, six months ago, Mr. Herbst, who builds artificial intelligence capabilities at PricewaterhouseCoopers in New York, did what comes naturally to him. He consulted A.I.
He took photos of the wine list, uploaded the images to ChatGPT, and asked it to recommend some bottles that would both go with the food and be good values. He said he’s now done this a half dozen times.
At restaurants without a sommelier, he said, it helps to prevent him from making a clueless choice. And at restaurants with wine experts, A.I. has given him useful talking points.
“It helps me have a better conversation with the somm,” Mr. Herbst said. “If you’re starting with an idea, they can help you explore. That’s probably better than just starting from scratch.”
Artificial intelligence is infiltrating all aspects of American life, including wine. Restaurants from coast to coast are seeing guests consult A.I. chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini as an aid, or perhaps a crutch, in the often anxiety-provoking chore of selecting a bottle.
Chase Sinzer said he hasn’t seen guests using A.I. at his East Village restaurants Claud and Penny and his wine bar Stars, but he can tell they are from the questions they ask.
“I have zero doubt,” he said. “We’ve run situations through ChatGPT and Claude trying to prepare ourselves for the questions. We’ve actually done classes with the somms for each scenario.”
Mr. Sinzer likened guests using A.I. to people consulting with friends before going out to eat.
“For us, the only thing that matters is to deal with whatever people bring to the table and make it a hospitality situation,” he said. “It’s just another challenge and an opportunity.”
While the rise of A.I. in wine has often elicited nightmarish scenarios of technology replacing sommeliers or, God forbid, wine writers, so far it has largely proven to be a useful tool rather than a fearsome Frankenstein’s monster.
At Bavel in Los Angeles, a Middle Eastern restaurant with a deep and varied wine list, Claudia Rosellini, the wine director, likes to bring several bottles to a table for a sort of show-and-tell situation. She encourages her sommeliers to have conversations with each table, so that the wine-selection process feels adventurous and experiential rather than transactional.
While it’s conceivable that A.I. could diminish these exchanges between guests and sommeliers, Ms. Rosellini has found instead that it’s been an enhancement.
“People making the conscious effort with A.I., it means they’re curious, and that makes me happy,” she said.
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