The house red is on the free tier

A hospitality software provider would begin rolling out subscription tiers for the wine list itself, with the model's three recommendations shown free and the rest of the cellar unlocked monthly. Restaurants would keep the bottles; diners would rent the right to read about them.

Restaurants and wine retailers increasingly use software to recommend wines, including systems that generate pairings and descriptions from a guest's order or stated preferences. Hospitality point-of-sale and menu platforms are adding AI features and, like most software products, package them into subscription tiers with more capability at higher prices. Digital menus accessed by QR code became widespread during the pandemic and have persisted in many venues, giving operators control over what is shown to whom and when. Menu engineering, the practice of arranging and highlighting items to steer choices toward higher-margin dishes and bottles, is a long-established part of the trade. Consumers also report fatigue with the number of recurring subscriptions they hold.

A sign in the window of a small wine shop on a suburban parade would read, in the typeface the software supplies: RECOMMENDATIONS FREE. FULL LIST FROM £6.99 A MONTH. STAFF AVAILABLE ON THE RESERVE TIER. Under the scheme, drafted by one of the larger restaurant-software providers for the coming year, the printed wine list would be retired in favour of a screen that shows each guest the three bottles a model has selected for them, ranked by predicted satisfaction and stock rotation. Everything else in the cellar would remain physically present and legally for sale. It simply would not be listed.

The free tier would present the three recommendations without prices, vintages or grape, on the grounds that the model has already weighed those. The Guest tier, at £6.99 a month, would restore the full list in alphabetical order. The Reserve tier would add the vintage column, the region, and the ability to sort by price, a feature the provider's documentation would describe as 'advanced'. Guests on the top tier would be entitled to ask a member of staff a question about the wine, and to receive an answer that had not been generated on the till.

Colin Ashby, who would run the shop with the sign, would say the first week had gone quietly. 'People come in, the screen offers them a Malbec, and most of them take the Malbec,' he said. 'The ones who ask what else we have, I tell them it's on the app.' He would keep a handwritten list under the counter for regulars, which the provider's terms would classify as an unlicensed distribution of catalogue data. He said he had read the terms. He said he had not read them closely.

Restaurants adopting the scheme would report a marked simplification of service. With the list withdrawn, the average time between sitting down and ordering would fall to under two minutes, most of it spent looking for the price. A bistro chain in the north would trial a Reserve-only dining room, where every guest was assumed to be subscribed and the wine list was projected onto the tablecloth. Guests who were not subscribed would see a tablecloth. The kitchen would report that food orders had also improved, because people ordered faster when they had nothing to read.

Sommeliers would be retained under a new job title, Human Override, and made available to top-tier guests at the discretion of the model. Tomasz Wrona, who would hold the title at a hotel restaurant, would say the model summoned him roughly twice a shift, usually when a guest had declined all three recommendations and the system had run out of ideas. 'I come to the table, I say what I think, and then I log it,' he said. 'The next week, my suggestion is one of the three recommendations. The week after, I'm not called.'

Household sharing would be limited to one table. A family of six logging in on a single Guest subscription would see the list dim after the second glass, with a prompt to upgrade. Nadia Fenwick, a diner in the west of the city, would say she had subscribed for a single evening to find out what the second-cheapest wine was, an item she had ordered on principle for twenty years. 'It was the same as the house red,' she said. 'Different label. Same wine. I cancelled the subscription at the table and the screen offered me a Malbec.'

The provider would describe the tiers as a response to guest feedback that wine lists were long. A spokesperson would say that most guests 'do not want a list, they want a decision', and that the model's recommendations were accepted in nine cases out of ten, a figure the provider would attribute to the quality of the recommendations. Independent retailers would note that the figure also describes what happens when a person is shown three things. The provider would not publish the acceptance rate for guests who had seen the full list, on the grounds that they were a different tier.

By the end of the year the printed wine list would survive mainly as a collector's item, sold in the shop window beside the sign. Mr Ashby would say a regular had bought one and asked him to sign it. The list was from 2019 and half the wines on it had since been discontinued. He said the man had read it twice, slowly, on the pavement outside, and then come back in and ordered the Malbec.