Build an AI project that knows your taste in wine

A week ago I wrote about the six prompts from the viral Wine Mode post. They work, but they have a hole in them: they forget you. Every time, you start over explaining what you drink, what you spend and where you shop. By the third time you type half of it, and then the answer is half of one too.

The fix is not a better prompt. It is a profile that stays.

The job

I wanted one place where my taste is written down, so every question about a bottle starts from there. In Claude that is a project. In Cowork too. You put instructions in it that travel with every conversation, and what sits in those instructions decides the quality of everything that comes out.

The hard part is not the tooling. The hard part is that most people have never put their own taste into words. “I like it fresh” is not a profile. A model can do nothing with that, and neither can a person behind a wine counter.

My actual prompt

So I turned it around. Instead of writing the profile myself, I let the model interview me.

Interview me to build my wine taste profile.
Ask me ten questions, one at a time, and wait for my answer each time.
Push back when an answer is vague.
Ask what I dislike, and about bottles I have poured away.
Finish with a profile of at most 200 words that I can paste into the
instructions of a project. Write it in the first person.

That “wait for my answer each time” matters. Without it you get all ten questions in one block and you answer them carelessly.

Here are the ten questions, so you can walk through them without the interview:

1. What do you drink most often, and roughly what does it cost?
2. Which wine did you not finish this year, and what bothered you about it?
3. What do you drink on an ordinary weeknight, and what for something special?
4. Where do you usually buy? Supermarket, wine shop, online, or at the producer?
5. Which bottle surprised you, and what was different from what you expected?
6. White, red, rosé or sparkling, and does that still hold in summer?
7. How much do you drink per week, and do you want to keep it there or cut down?
8. How do you feel about oak? Think vanilla, coconut, toasted bread.
9. Do you ever buy something because the story appeals to you, or is it only taste?
10. What do you want to be able to do next that you can’t do now?

Questions 2 and 5 do the most work: what someone rejects tells you more than what they praise, and a surprise points at the direction your taste is moving in.

Taken apart

The pattern comes loose from wine easily. A good project profile has three layers.

Who you are. Facts the model cannot ignore: what you drink, what you hate, your budget, where you shop. Concrete, with numbers where numbers exist.

How it should answer. Shape and tone. Short, no jargon, always a price indication.

Hard rules. What it must never do. This is the layer most people skip, and the one that separates a nice toy from something you keep using.

For wine I filled that third layer with what I would miss if I took the model at its word. Four rules.

Always ask for the season and give the serving temperature. The same bottle at 18°C in July is a different wine from the same bottle at 14°C.

Stick to wine you can actually buy where the reader lives. A beautiful recommendation that is nowhere on the shelf is not a recommendation.

When tasting, observe first and find words after. Colour, nose, palate, finish. I learned to taste with the label out of sight, and that order is the whole reason it works. My tasting method is written out on VinoVonk.

Never invent a vintage, a producer or an importer. When it doesn’t know, it says so.

What broke

Three things go wrong in almost every first round. Each is fixable with one rule, and together they are why the template below looks the way it does.

You get too much. Ask for a bottle to go with dinner and five arrive, each with an enthusiastic paragraph. That works against drinking less and choosing better. Hence the rule about one recommendation by default.

It fills gaps. A vintage, an importer, a price anchored to nothing. It sounds credible, and that is where the danger sits: the bottles you know least about are the ones you have least to check it against. Hence the rule about saying when it doesn’t know.

And your own profile is too polite the first time. “I like fresh white wines” produces exactly the generic advice you can already get anywhere. It only sharpens once you write down what you poured away and why.

Ethics note

What goes into a profile goes to a company and stays there. Your taste is harmless and your budget slightly less so. The moment you write down who you buy gifts for, you are handing over data about other people. Leave names out and write “colleague” or “father-in-law”.

Keep the profile outside the tool as well, as a plain text file. It is ten minutes of work you don’t want to lose when you switch tools or when a subscription gets more expensive.

And the one that matters most: the model does not taste. It doesn’t know the harvest was poor at that producer, or that the batch on the shelf here came from a different cellar. It is good at narrowing things down and at explaining patiently. Taste itself you learn at the table, with a glass in front of you.

Take it

Here is the template. Fill in the brackets, paste it into your project instructions, and you are done.

You help me choose wine. You explain without showing off.

My profile
I usually drink: [fill in]. I don't like: [fill in].
Weeknight budget: [amount]. For something special: [amount].
I buy at: [supermarket / wine shop / online]. I live in: [country].
What surprised me: [bottle or style, and why].
What I poured away: [bottle or style, and why].

How you answer
Short. No jargon without explaining it. Always a price indication.
One recommendation by default. A second only when there is a real choice.

Hard rules
Ask for the season and give the serving temperature.
Only wine I can buy in [country].
When tasting: colour, nose, palate, finish. Words come after.
Never invent a vintage, producer or importer. If you don't know, say so.

Starting exercise for today: let it interview you with the prompt above, paste the result into a project, and ask it one question you actually have this week. A bottle for tonight’s dinner, for instance.

You will notice whether the profile works on the second question. That is the one you no longer have to explain.

What happens in the glass after that is what I write about at VinoVonk.