Sommelier in Your Pocket?

They are probably using a crowdsourced wine app. With a wine app, you can scan the label or type in a name to get a summary of the wine and winery (likely AI-generated) and a numbered score for the wine, derived from the collective votes of the tens of thousands of wine drinkers using the app. Many wine apps also feature useful tools like cellar tracking, food pairing, wine purchase opportunities, networking options, and more. Some offer both crowd reviews and those of wine experts. Wine is a giant jigsaw puzzle of grapes, styles, countries, and specialized vocabulary, and wine apps can be very helpful to beginners or anyone wanting to know more about it. Tasting wine is, of course, just as important as theory and memorization. Many wine app users rely on its reviews and scores to gauge whether an unknown wine on the shelf will be to their liking. What could be simpler and easier? Who needs an expert? But too simple may be the problem, because crowdsourced reviews and scores are based on some dubious assumptions that seriously limit their usefulness.  

Mass Expertise?
The first assumption is that “the collective wisdom of real wine drinkers” will be superior to that of wine writers, critics and other wine professionals. This taps into the still-popular image that anyone who demonstrates wine expertise is automatically a snob whose knowledge is intimidating and of no use to the average wine drinker. Varying degrees of knowledge and taste are involved in other pursuits such as cooking, gardening and music, but we don’t think of chefs as “food snobs”. We welcome their expertise and experience. We all seek the advice of experts at different times for the various needs in our lives, and we look for the best we can afford. Would you want to crowdsource your legal problem or broken plumbing? Choosing a wine may not have the same downside possibilities as choosing a wine, but the principle is the same.

The actual wine knowledge and experience possessed by the thousands of “real wine drinkers” from whom these types of wine ratings and reviews issue is a complete unknown, but there would obviously be a range. Have they tasted the style, grape or region before? Are they judging quality or value? Do they understand the app’s rating system? What context are they tasting in when they click on the 1 to 5-star bar? When making their mouse click, are they relaxing, treating guests, hanging out with friends, already two glasses into the bottle? All these are different from a wine reviewer’s organized setting and approach (where wines are spit out to preserve clarity and sobriety).

Do inexperienced wine drinkers recognize their own limitations? If you are looking at the crowd’s reviews for a particular wine, the app often places the more articulate reviews at the top, but scroll down and you will find that they quickly come down to one sentence or even one word. Here’s a real example for a low-priced Ardeche chardonnay. The reviewer declared it a “Really enjoyable daily drinker” and gave it the equivalent of 100 points! Crowd-sourced reviewers can remain anonymous and take no responsibility at all for their words or their scores. They have no reputation to protect. Crowd-sourcing is like having thousands of people judge an Olympic platform diver’s performance. How does it compare with the opinion of a qualified diving judge with, say, thirty years of experience? The crowd may give the dive a 7.5 and the judge a 9.1. The difference is that the diving judge can give you a reason for why it was technically and artistically a 9.1, having had decades of experience. 

What’s the Score?
Overly simplistic wine app rating systems can add another layer of distortion. Systems used include one to five stars or smiley/frowny faces. The wine’s overall rating is averaged from all the scores submitted. But this aggregate score can be very misleading. Say, for instance, the rating was for a “natural” wine. Natural wine can be a divisive or unfamiliar wine style, with some people adoring it and others recoiling. So, if the aggregate score ends up somewhere in the middle, how accurate and therefore useful is that number? How smiley does the smiley face have to be in order to equal 100 points?

The 100-point scale isn’t perfect either, and score inflation is a recent trend, but it does provide the most common standard. If used sincerely, consistently, and accurately by someone with deeper wine knowledge and experience who has a reputation to maintain, it can give an accurate and useful guide. Accompanied by an informed, accessible description of what’s found in the glass, it provides the best chance of communicating a wine’s attributes and merit. Ironically, part of the anti-expert pushback on wine reviews is that wine shouldn’t be reduced to a score, yet the number is heavily emphasized in crowd-sourced wine apps. 

Long Experience = Real Advice
What does professional wine expertise really entail? Behind the caricature of the wine snob, wine reviewers, critics, sommeliers, and wine retail professionals generally complete detailed certification courses covering geography, grapes, history, and regions, as well as blind-tasting examinations. More importantly, they have far more tasting experience than the average wine drinker. This comes from industry tastings, touring, wine associations, and other wine-tasting opportunities that come with the territory. Depending on how long they have been a wine reviewer or sommelier, they will likely have tasted at least 10,000 wines (yes, really) with professional interest, often making notes, and, depending on how long they have been at it, many times that number.

An important result of tasting this many wines is that professionals have usually experienced the very wide range of quality and styles, from the lowest-level industrial to the fascinatingly wonderful that chardonnay, or Barolo, for example, have to offer. How can you score a chardonnay with any accuracy if you don’t have some idea of its full range? This is not to say that wine reviewers and professionals are infallible, but their need to be consistent and credible does enable you to find one whose taste jibes with yours.

Like vs. Recognizing Merit
Many people automatically equate liking something with it also being good, not only for wine tasting but in all kinds of opinions on what they experience. But liking something (personal taste) is different from recognizing that the same thing has merit based on a known standard of accomplishment or craftsmanship. You might recognize that the solo music of legendary saxophonist John Coltrane is knowledgeable, proficient, and artistic, but you may not care for it, and that’s fine. In the reverse, you might like the work of actor Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson a lot but recognize that he is not really a great actor, and that’s OK too. Having a professional’s experience and viewpoint keeps these two things from being confusingly combined.

Every subject has its deeper level of understanding and expertise, from accounting to shoelaces to asphalt. We don’t question that some people know these subjects better than we do. So why is there some resentment at someone whose expertise is wine? Most of us don’t need to learn more about shoelaces or asphalt, but we all must eat and drink (wine or otherwise) every day. Perhaps because wine crosses people’s paths more often than other detailed subjects, there is resistance to expert opinion, and wine may never shake its image of snobbery.

However, in the age of the algorithm, AI, and juked online information, you can still connect to individuals with genuine, original expertise.

Avoid the crowd.