The full wine list may require an upgrade

A sign in the window of a wine merchant on a high street in the east of England would read, in the merchant's own handwriting: Full list available to Tier 2 and above. Tier 1 customers, please ask for the red. Under a scheme the trade's recommendation providers could adopt by 2040, the wine list would no longer be a document but an access level, with the number of bottles a diner is permitted to see set by the monthly plan attached to their palate.

Restaurants and wine retailers increasingly use software, including AI-based recommendation tools, to suggest bottles and pairings, and diners can scan a printed list with an app to get advice. Consumer AI products are commonly sold in tiers, with a free level that has fewer features and paid levels that unlock more. Sponsored placement inside recommendation results is standard practice on shopping and delivery platforms. Digital menus make it technically simple to show different customers different things based on their history.

Under the scheme, a restaurant or merchant would no longer print a list but license it to a pairing model, which would show each customer the selection appropriate to their plan. Tier 1, free and supported by producers, would display three wines and a note that others exist. Tier 2 would display the list. Tier 3 would display the list together with the bottles the restaurant had been hoping to keep for itself. A briefing from one of the larger recommendation providers would describe the printed list as a legacy format with a known fairness problem: it showed everyone the same thing.

The sign would belong to a merchant such as Douglas Prentice, who would have sold wine from the same shop for twenty-two years before a representative explained that his shelves were unstructured data. “He'd tell me the model knows what my customers would enjoy,” Mr Prentice might say. “I'd tell him I know what they'd enjoy, I've sold Mrs Hale the same Rioja every Friday for a decade. He'd say that was exactly the kind of bias the system removes.” Mrs Hale, on Tier 1, would be shown a Merlot from a producer she had never heard of, and a note that her usual bottle was available on upgrade.

At table, the arrangement would produce what one provider's documentation calls a mixed-tier party. Marion Tully, a school administrator, would describe a birthday dinner at which her husband, on Tier 2, could see a Barolo that did not exist on her screen. “He read it out to me,” she would say. “The waiter came over and said that reading the list aloud to a lower tier is a breach of terms, and that he was obliged to mention it. Then he stood there looking at the ceiling.” The Barolo, she would add, was very good, and had been billed to whichever of them could see it.

The plan would attach to a palate profile rather than a person, built from every bottle a customer had bought, returned, or lingered over. On the free tier the profile would learn what a diner liked and, separately, what a producer had paid for them to like, and would present both under the single heading Recommended. Lapsed subscribers would be handled with care. The profile would retain their preferences in full, so that a Tier 1 customer who once favoured a particular Chablis would find the model aware of this and unable to act on it. Their taste would be kept as data and withheld as service.

Human sommeliers would remain on the floor under the revised title of tier disambiguation staff. Ines Marlow, who trained for nine years and would now spend her evenings explaining to diners why their screens differ, would put the change plainly. “I used to ask what they were having. Now I ask what they're on.” The role would carry one new duty: when a Tier 1 diner asks what else there is, staff would be permitted to say that there is more, but not what. “You can gesture at the cellar,” she would say. “You can't point at a shelf.”

The trade body for recommendation providers would reject the suggestion that anyone was being denied wine. “Every customer is shown the wines most relevant to their level of commitment,” a spokesperson for the Hospitality Recommendation Federation would say. “Relevance is not the same as availability, and we have never claimed otherwise.” The free tier would in any case include a bottle listed simply as House, which the model would describe, if asked, as regionally appropriate. Asked which region, it would offer an upgrade.

Back at the shop, Mr Prentice would have added a second line to the sign, in smaller letters, after a fortnight of watching Tier 1 customers stand in the doorway. “Tier 1 customers are also welcome to look at the bottles.” The bottles, he would point out, were still physically on the shelves, with their labels facing outward, and nobody had yet found a way to charge for that. “The rep says the shelves are on the roadmap,” he would say. “I asked him what that meant. He said it meant they've noticed.”