Have you ever wished you had a personal sommelier to help you choose the right wine?
A wine that’s perfect for the occasion, tastes great according to your personal preferences, and is at the right price point for you?
That’s exactly what Vivino can do for you. Vivino is the world’s largest online wine marketplace, and with the help of the data being generated by their 51 million users, you can always find the right wine for you.
I interviewed Heini Zachariassen, Vivino’s Founder and CEO, about how Vivino is using big data and artificial intelligence to help people find and purchase their perfect wine.
Getting More Info in the Wine Aisle
Most people aren’t wine experts, and there are a lot of choices on the market. So when people walk into a supermarket or beverage store and see a wall of wine choices, it’s easy to get overwhelmed.
Heini Zachariassen originally founded the Vivino app to empower people with the knowledge to make better choices for them, and remove a lot of the mystery from the wine world.
When you snap a photo of a bottle of wine, you can immediately look at crowdsourced reviews, check prices, and even place an order right from your phone. You can also scan wine lists in restaurants to help you pick the right vino when you’re out at a nice restaurant.
Vivino’s unique wine shopping experience is 100% powered by community data – 20,000 new users download the app every day.
When asked how important data is to Vivino, Heini said:
“The real game-changer for us is that we know all these wines by now. We have 1.5 billion pictures of wine labels, 200 million ratings, and 10 million wines in the database. 200 million ratings. The data is the key to our business, and no other company can compete with us because we have that information and have 50 million users helping us maintain it.”
The Vivino app can tell you whether the wine has the level of smoothness or dryness you’re looking for, whether it’s a good match for your meal, and even whether or not it’s a good deal.
After you’ve tried the wine, you can record your own rating and tasting notes in the app, and it will add that information to your profile to expand its knowledge of your tastes and preferences.
Personalized Matches for Every Wine Drinker
Vivino recently built artificial intelligence (AI) on top of all their review and profile data to create algorithms that generate a personalized match score for every user and every wine.
Once you’ve rated at least five wines, every wine in the database will have a “match score” that’s generated just for you, letting you know if there’s a high, medium, or low chance that you’ll like it.
These match scores are generated specifically for you – Vivino knows that a 5-star wine for someone else might not be a knockout choice for you.
“Even I’m surprised how accurate it is,” Heini says. “The app knows things about me that I didn’t even realize. For example, I love champagne. Some champagnes are based on Pinot Noir, and some are based on Chardonnay. The Vivino algorithm actually recognized that the champagnes I didn’t care for were all Chardonnay-based ones. I had no idea.”
The Data That Connects User to Vineyard
Heini believes that the wine industry will be able to build on the big data Vivino and other wine tech companies have gathered, and use machine learning and artificial intelligence to continue to push the boundaries of the industry in the future.
You can watch my full interview with Vivino founder and CEO Heini Zachariassen here:
