How Did It Come to This?

You might be wondering how it came to this...stay a while, and listen...

For years, I've never really been what you might call a "drinker". I'm still not sure I'd say that's true (though I'm betting there are a few people who would disagree with me at this point...)

Something happened in October 2024...I'm not really sure what. Like most families, mine would pull out bottles of wine at family dinners or special occasions, and I would generally pass or avoid (or more recently, choose a cocktail). It was never something I really enjoyed or went out of the way to try and learn more about.

Earlier this year -- I gave up one of the few "hobbies" I actually have/had (World of Warcraft probably shouldn't count -- I'm prepared to call it a bit of addiction...IYKYK) and found myself with some time on my hands. Lots of other productive things to do and yet for some reason I decided it was time to learn more about wine. Having done the 'work every evening until bed thing' for 5-6 years at a previous gig, I wasn't necessarily prepared to return to that life just yet.

There's lots of ways to go about this -- the internet has clearly made it easier to find more information about...anything really, so finding information wasn't going to be the challenge. Which sources to trust and how to ensure I was reading "good" information were definitely top of mind.

Having spent some time over the past year playing with large-language model AI like ChatGPT (OpenAI) and Claude.AI (Anthropic) I wondered if I could somehow educate myself and curate my journey/new hobby (my family likes to tell me I have a tendency to decide I'm "so into" and then invest wildly in it...they're not wrong) through the use of AI. I wondered what my experience would be -- machines can't taste so they can only rely on the information out there. Even worse, when it comes down to something as subjective as taste, would I find myself spending money on what was more popular as opposed to what was actually "good" (remembering that of course, I had no idea what was "good", only what I knew from what I had been told).

This is my little way of recording my adventures through working with LLMs to try and curate a "cellar" and actually figuring out what it is I like (assuming there is anything at all!)

For the first few posts, this will be a lot of recounting the past few months: we'll cover the initial tries of working with the various LLMs to try and establish my preferences (taking into consideration, of course, important factors like the WAF or 'Wife Acceptance Factor'), finding wines that matched, and then, more practically, trying to actually BUY those wines (given the challenges in Ontario of actually LOCATING a bottle).

At any rate -- welcome to 2025!