How we built this
This came out of Record Bore. I wanted to see if you could give a language model taste, not just more knowledge. A narrow point of view, backed by things you can check.
The data
The base is Liv-ex’s LWIN list: 185,293 wines and 34,466 producers.
Then 2,455 EU appellations and the actual rulebooks for 1,080 of them: the cahiers des charges, disciplinari and pliegos.
That joins to 55,971 grape/appellation relationships across 2,125 varieties, plus producer data from Wikidata, 41 trade bodies, producer websites and an Exa sweep of the 500 biggest houses.
96% of live European wines now resolve to an appellation.
For taste, there are 5,675 rulebook clauses describing how wines should look, smell and taste, plus 536 tasting notes from the Swedish state monopoly.
Nothing from growers yet.
How he answers
A character file and a few lookups across wines, grapes, producers and appellations. Facts have to come from the data he just looked up. If they don’t, he checks again or says he doesn’t know.
Where it goes next
The interesting bit is making the taste more specific.
A merchant could add its own stock. A thousand voice notes on a thousand wines would make him sound like somebody in particular.
That’s the next experiment.
What it isn’t
No review sites. No scraped tasting notes. No Vivino.
