Wine tech's big problem: Algorithms may not be the answer

Pix had hoped to perfect the art of the flavour search algorithm, allowing you to search for wines based on the flavours you seek, though it never quite got it to work. — Image by Drazen Zigic on Freepik

Wine and the Internet are strange bedfellows.

I've been thinking about this a lot during the last couple weeks while working on two very different assignments about wine tech companies — one on the brink of collapse, one thriving. The first was about the demise of Pix, which promised to make it easy for people to discover wines they'll enjoy and find out where to buy them. The second was about the highest-rated wines on the crowd-sourcing wine app Vivino.