Study shows some wine aromatics aren’t released until they meet the bacteria in our mouths “At least 700 bacterial species live in our saliva, on our teeth and on all the interior surfaces of our mouths. “For this study, sponsored by Spain’s Institute of Food Science Research in Madrid and published in the journal Food […]
Archive | Current System Paradigms
How sensory taste profiling stops short of individual recommendation accuracy
I continually shop for new wines like an average consumer. I do this to get put of the “wine bubble” that keeps reality at an arm’s length for so many wine geeks, fans, enthusiasts, spectators, aficionados, and members of the trade. How by-the-glass doesn’t work and can trash a winery’s reputation When Rogue Wine Calibration […]
New Research Shows Why Wine Descriptions Don’t Help Consumers Select Wine
New research recently published in the journal Neurocomputing shows one more reason why consumers get little help in choosing wines from the descriptions in wine reviews: the same words mean different things to different people. This fits in with — MISINTERPRETATION: Words = Big Trouble — which is one of the issues that we have […]
Turning White Wine Into Red: Recommendation Failures & The Alchemy Of Context
“[N]o event or object is ever experienced in perfect, objective isolation. It is instead subject to our past experiences, our current mood, our expectations, and any number of incidental details—an annoying neighbor, a waiter who keeps banging your chair, a beautiful painting in your line of sight. With something like wine, all sorts of societal […]
Wine And Music Are A Lot Alike & So Are The Ways Their Recommendation Systems Fail
Wine and music: please our senses, touch our emotions, beg to be shared, are deeply engrained in how we define ourselves and, can determine how other people judge us. Because of those factors, every recommendation system in use today — including those deployed by Pandora, Spotify, Slacker and other online music sites — fail because of: […]
Machine Learning + Big Data + Tribes = Happier Consumers & Fewer Regulation Hassles
Complaints about the use of personal information for everything from predictive product recommendations to credit ratings and consumer credit card interest rates have provoked lawsuits, increasing consumer outrage, and a growing chorus of demands for tighter governmental controls. The greater accuracy of the Tribes algorithm plus its ability to perform in a totally anonymous data […]
How Predictive Big Data Fails
Recommendations from big data predictive methods are a lot like the use of epidemiology to determine the cause of a disease: Both rely on the statistical analysis and correlation of massive amounts of data. Both are indicative that something is happening. Both can offer insights into a phenomenon. Both are easily derailed by unknown confounding […]
INCOMPATIBILITY: Profile Matching
A PERSONAL NOTE: My apologies in advance to a number of good friends and colleagues who are still trying to get wine profile systems to work. But, as you read on, my hands-on experience and further research leads me to believe that the system has inherent problems that will prevent it from reaching the potential […]
THE PROBLEM: Casino Recommendations
This is part of a series on flaws in current wine recommendation systems originally published at Wine Industry Insights: Genetics: Inherited Taste Chaos Sabotages How Wine Gets Recommended Scaling: 3/4 Of Wine In The US Has NEVER Been Rated By Critics Misinterpretation: Words: Big Trouble For Tasting Notes Inconsistency: Rating The Rating Systems Psychology: Vino-Anxiety, […]
GENETICS: Inherited Taste Chaos Sabotages Recommendations
Some people hate the taste of raw tomatoes. Others get positively hostile if you try to feed them cilantro. Broccoli bashers abound. Liquorice loathers understandably shy away from foods seasoned with fennel and anise seed. What does this have to do with wine preferences? Only everything. INDIVIDUAL PREFERENCE VS. RATING One of the things that […]