“Last week, I watched the episode of The West Wing where President Bartlet calls the Butterball hotline and is arguing with them,” says Evan Roscoe, a Napa, California-based social media consultant for wineries. “I thought, ‘This would be a really great thing for the wine industry.’”
Over Halloween, while trick-or-treating with his kid, Roscoe kept thinking about it. He’d also learned that search traffic about wine surges before Thanksgiving. He came up with a plan: a website, with a chat, not unlike the many chatbots popping up these days, but powered by humans with real wine expertise answering real questions. It would run for 24 hours, the day before Thanksgiving, and invite anyone to ask any question they have about buying, selecting, or pairing bottles for the holiday. “Lord knows we like to talk about our wine,” he says, “and this is the time that people have questions.”
Before going to bed on Saturday, Roscoe posted an Instagram story mapping out the idea with a poll asking if people were interested in helping. “I think the options were, ‘Yes, I want to make wine fun’ or ‘No, I’ll already be drunk,’” he says. When he woke up, he had 50 interested wine industry experts. He launched Ask Wines on Monday, jokingly describing it as being fueled by somm—rather than artificial—intelligence. So far, the experts interested comprise sommeliers, winemakers, wine directors, wine buyers, drinks writers and people pursuing WSET diplomas. The author and content creator André Mack will be answering questions, as will Megan Bell, who founded Margins Wine and now works for the California Association of Winegrape Growers.
Finding so many people willing to lend a hand wasn’t all that surprising. “Wine is seen as unapproachable, but wineries and people who work in wine are very approachable,” says Roscoe. That’s also the basis of the project. “I think that when people are asking questions about wine, it isn’t necessarily a lot of how-to’s. It’s more of a reassurance that they’re not violating some unspoken rule.” Because of that, he anticipates that a lot of the questions coming into the chat will be about what pairings people are “allowed” to have, or how many bottles to pick up for a certain number of people, or “I’m at the grocery store and there are a thousand options. What do I pick?”
Roscoe’s project comes at a time when apparently customers keep turning to bots rather than the professional wine experts who are there to personally advise them. The reasons for this trend have been enumerated: People may feel overwhelmed with the amount of options or insecure about a lack of wine knowledge or they might not know what the role of the sommelier really is (or, cynically, maybe they are addicted to asking the robot in their phones for information). Part of Roscoe’s aim is to show those people that most of the wine industry really does want to help. Wine, he points out, doesn’t have to be pretentious.
“This is a success to me if people walk away thinking that talking to people in the wine industry is a lot easier than they thought,” he says. “The whole point is that we can connect with wine drinkers and help them have a better holiday.”