Let Artificial Intelligence Pick Your Wine With This New App

For most of us, a trip to the wine aisle conjures images of bewilderment. You scour the shelves, looking for what your taste buds crave with nothing more than the label, price, and whatever the winemaker wants to write about their wine. However, Wine Ring is out to change that.

The new mobile app is like having a personal sommelier in your pocket, there to tell you exactly what you want. Simply by rating wines "love, like, so-so or dislike," Wine Ring's advanced algorithm learns what types of wine you like and recommends new choices based on your past experiences. In a way, it's basically Netflix for wines, building an individual profile from past recommendations and suggesting wines that match your profile.

There are other wine apps on the market that tell you other people's reviews of wines with a simple picture of the label. However, Wine Ring is the only app that is catered to individual preferences and able to answer the only question that most buyers have in mind: "Will I like it?"                          

Ian Cauble, master sommelier and founder of SommSelect — a website that offers daily selections of sommelier-chosen wines — has already partnered with Wine Ring. Cauble plans to integrate the app's software with SommSelect's existing daily selection to better aid consumers in their quests for wine they'll love.

For Cauble, using individual taste profiles is absolutely necessary. He said tastes of sweetness and bitterness are different for everyone because everyone's DNA is unique. Since no two origin stories are alike, and everyone grew up eating different foods and cultivating different taste buds, everyone's opinion on wine will be different—and in the end, you might disagree with a master sommelier like Cauble. That's why the personalization offered by Wine Ring is so important.

"At the end of the day you should enjoy your life," Cauble said, "and you should enjoy your sense of taste."

We'll drink to that.