AI and the wine writer

“Knowing everything you do about me, what would you imagine are my feelings about AI in the world of wine writing?” It took Claude less than a minute to come up with a 610-word response to my question that, honestly, wasn’t bad. And slightly sycophantic (because AI is always so much more polite than humans). So, did Claude get it right? “Based on everything you've shared over time, I suspect...
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From the Chair: Personal taste

Meg Maker questions what makes wine writers unique in a world of automation and AI in her column and Letter from the Chair. I put off writing this Letter from the Chair. What do I know about AI? I’m not a mathematician or computer scientist. I’m not a technology researcher or academic. I did take a course in graduate school about the philosophy of mind in which I learned about the Turing Test and...
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Tuning in to the tools of the AI trade

Per and Britt Karlsson already use artificial intelligence quite extensively in their work, but certainly not to write text, nor to create images, which are two of their core vinous activities. So, how do they use AI? Here, Per takes a look at some of the areas where it can come into play. “Do you use AI?” Today, this is no longer really a question. We use AI, everyone uses AI. You cannot refuse ...
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Honing the human touch

Simon J Woolf sets out his stall on how wine writers will ultimately survive AI, and even thrive from it. While it will not make us redundant – far from it – we need to work out how it best fits into our workflows, without allowing it to do the writing, which remains our greatest strength, he opines. It takes a brave person to stand up in front of six publishers and ask them whether they would co...
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How AI is advancing ampelography

From DNA to data, artificial intelligence is beginning to read the vine, according to grape geneticist and ampelographer Dr José Vouillamoz, who also explores whether it will also decide its future. The possibilities are boundless, with an electronic nose already being used to classify cultivars, and Vouillamoz, one of the world's leading authorities on grape variety origins through DNA profiling,...
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From the Chair: Help another wine writer in 2026

In her column this month, Circle Chair Meg Maker encourage members to help and mentor colleagues as their New Year’s resolution for 2026. Wine as a category is experiencing myriad existential threats: climatic, meteorological, social, cultural, financial. It’s a destabilising time, but as wine commentators our role is to help make sense of it all, prying apart false and shaky claims, dismantling ...
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Perusing Planeta’s broad and colourful palette of Sicilian wines

Robert Smyth takes a tour through Sicily’s wine regions while visiting Planeta, a prolific producer with vines and wines spanning the large Italian island.  After having long enjoyed Planeta’s wines from afar, it was a wonderful to finally get the opportunity to visit them in Sicily, and also catch up with their Hungarian winemaker Patricia Tóth. Driving up the winding roads to Planeta’s winery ...
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Substack for wine writers

CWW Chair Meg Maker shares her experiences on Substack and talks to other wine writers migrating to the online platform. Five months ago I migrated my wine publication, Maker’s Table, from WordPress to Substack. I was sick of the infrastructure demands and expense of WordPress and eager to take advantage of tools baked into the Substack platform. Those include text and video posts, newsletter ema...
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Shared expressions of the Turbiana grape

From the southern shores of Lake Garda, Italy’s largest lake, Robin Goldsmith loads up on Lugana and savours a tantalising trio of tannins, acidity and salinity, served up with freshness and clarity. A version of this article was originally published on The Write Taste. Lugana DOC, which encompasses five municipalities, lies on the southern shores of Lake Garda, the largest lake in Italy. It's on...
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