The news that the majority of US corporate earnings reports carried by Associated Press are written by computer bots comes as good news to Reg Lascaris, owner of Chocolate Block/Boekenhoutskloof/Porcupine Ridge/etc and the director of Diners Club who oversees the credit card’s wine label guide Platter. With Platter visualizers complaining like crazy this year that they’re paid less than last to visualize wine scores by scrutinizing the label and sometimes even tasting a glass, automation comes as a godsend. After all, AP noted that using computers to write stories “free journalists to do more journalism and less data processing.” In SA “journalism” means hanging out at Dias Tavern, Vasco da Gama or the Firemans’ Arms, doing research and cultivating contacts. 

Writing wine tasting notes is the kind of thing computers are good at as it’s just a question of stringing together permutations of “whispers of capsicum”, “optimal ripeness”, “made in the vineyard”, “light touch of oak” and “burnt rubber” (in the case of Pinotage). And besides, to save money and trees, Reg has decreed that lowly scoring wines won’t even get a tasting note, just a star or two. Which are easy to assign with inverse distance from Stellenbosch, the Swartland and Franschhoek a good place to start.

Already a Swedish bot called Lsjbot created by Swedish science teacher Sverker Johansson, has written over 3 million articles (in Swedish) for Wikipedia. Bots are probably already at work writing press releases for some of the major wine PR companies, judging by the repetitive nature and lack of fresh information many convey. So replacing Platter “sipping moms” with a computer program makes sense. It will free up the ladies for serious wine activities: slap up lunches with the marketing department at upscale restaurants attendees cannot normally afford nor indeed get bookings for.

Declaration: this blog post was written by NPbot.