Establishing Categories and Criteria

When you've decided to use AI to learn about wine but have no idea where to start...start with structure.

At some point while venturing along this road, there was a need to establish a little bit of structure. I'm still a little hazy about how I landed on the approach, though I'm pretty confident there's no attribution to AI required on this one 😉.

(We'll save taste preferences for another day...)

What makes the most sense? Wine review sites recommend bottles WELL out of my price range, and while I have a lot of interest in trying really nice bottles of wine, I'm also not so set on the notion that a wine can only be worth tasting/drinking/buying if it's expensive.

To be entirely systematic (because it FELT like it would be easier to get an LLM to do what I wanted if I had good rules and clear criteria), early on, I established some categories, criteria, and what I'll call guidelines (because it's becoming a favorite term at work just now).

First and foremost:

The Rules

• Each category should have no fewer than 5 wines. -- The idea here being to try and expose myself to a decent number of new opportunities here. There has to be at least 5 different wines in each category, right?
• Wines should only exist in one of my categories at a time. -- No sense while learning to limit myself and having overlap. We may find out over time that some of them BELONG in more than one category, but for someone getting started, it's actually way more interesting to have a lot of options (though admittedly overwhelming, both conceptually and financially!)
• Wines have to be AVAILABLE -- This proved to be extremely important. What good is it to have something on a list if I can't get it? We'll talk more about the availability of wine via the LCBO in Ontario in another post, but better to not get too excited about something and then find out you can't actually easily buy it! 😭

So with those criteria in mind, for now, I've settled on the following categories:

Daily Drivers -- Red/White

Straightforward - if you subscribe to the guidance that a glass of red wine a day is good for you and your heart, you need an affordable bottle of reasonable quality! Aim for less than $25/bottle

Special Occasion -- Red/White

Here's where it's easy to get confused and time to learn terms like "second wines". These bottles come out for a family dinner or celebration and (in my mind) are the bridge between an everyday-wine and something "really special"

Your definition of something 'really special' doesn't have to align to a price tag or someone else's tastes.

In this category, we expand the price range a bit to look at wines between $25 and $65 /bottle.

Unicorn Wines -- Red/White

I think I spent more time on the terminology for this (not for this blog, but with the LLMs) than likely anything else (with maybe the exception of fruitless searches via the LCBO website).

What is a "Unicorn"?

Truly "special" bottles -- again, for the purposes of putting guardrails around this, we put a price range of anywhere between $25 and $100/bottle. These are meant to be the truly spectacular bottles that you buy/pull out of storage when you get promoted or someone's celebrating something significant. They "punch above their weight class", are more difficult to come by, or are limited in quantity (but not unobtainable)

Sparkling & Champagne

The first of my really self-explanatory categories. Does it have bubbles? If yes, let's consider it here. No discrimination about where it was made -- if it has bubbles, and you're using it the next morning in a mimosa, sign me up (we'll spend some energy on flavor/texture profiles another day...)

After-Dinner & Dessert

For some reason when I talk about this one, all I can think about is the two guys in the balcony from the Muppet Show sitting in a leather-clad armchairs. That's not the idea, but it's also not NOT the idea. Is it sippable after a nice meal or with a cheese plate (P.S. -- while I might've considered myself a foodie at one point, I can count on one hand the number of times I've had a cheese plate after a meal. A cheese plate the meal itself is an entirely different matter).

Sparkling and After-Dinner categories had price ranges of between $0 and $75 (because of course it's easy to find something for nothing right? What did they teach me in university? "Free shit is good shit"? Thanks Carleton U!)

There you have it -- longer than expected but hopefully now you have a little more of an idea of the process in my head as I started down this path.

Next up: figuring out flavor profiles.