MORELAND HILLS: “Are you worried about AI taking your job?” a guest recently asked Chris Oppewall, president and sommelier at Cru Uncorked.
The offhand comment about artificial intelligence pairing wine with food seemed laughable. Or was it.
The fine-dining restaurant was already using AI to help with wine inventory and wine education. Oppewall pondered whether it could do something as discerning as pairing wine with sea scallops, filet mignon and more.
“I started putting our tasting menus and specials in Copilot and ChatGPT,” he said, noting two common AI tools. This wasn’t for serving guests but to play with the technology.
“It spit out some good choices. It’s been consistently good enough that the choices would fit right in,” he said.
The results surprised and inspired the sommelier team. In a playful spirit, they created a new installment in the Sommelier Showdown dinner series: Somms vs. AI.
In anticipation of the Sept 11 dinner, Chef Sam Lesniak will present sommeliers Oppewall, Janine Poleman and Anthony Taylor with a four-course dinner menu. Each sommelier will pair wines with at least one course. AI will pair wines with each course as well. All wines must come from 15,000 bottles in Cru’s cellar.
At dinner, each guest will receive two wines per course. They won’t know who paired the wine... man or machine. After each course the guest must cast one vote for their favourite wine.
Winners – somms or AI – will be revealed at dinner’s end.
To this point a human is ultimately in charge.
“One out of 10 AI answers are screwball, like a Syrah with scallops,” said Oppewall. “If I get that, I’ll ask AI to choose again. I would resubmit it rather than make a bad suggestion.”
For now, he doesn’t see AI endangering sommelier jobs.
“There’s just so many touchpoints to bringing in wine inventory,” he said. And guest relationships are important. “The sommelier has a greater capacity to read the table and understand the guest.” – cleveland.com/Tribune News Service
