Can a computer ever be a sommelier?

Speaker: Joe Fattorini | Managing Director + Behavioural Science Lead @ PixWine

Joe is known around the world as "Obi Wine Kenobi", the expert presenter on The Wine Show.

For the last 20 years, Joe has sold wine to restaurants, hotels, bars, and celebrity weddings as one of the UK's leading wine merchants. Today Joe guides 250 million viewers in 107 countries through The Wine Show, as well as wine lovers at sea as an ambassador to Celebrity Cruises.

Across his career, Joe wrote about wine for 14 years as the weekly wine correspondent for The Herald Newspaper. And he spent years talking about it to audiences of wine-loving golfers across the USA as a wine consultant to the PGA Tour.

In 2017 Joe has won both the IWSC Wine Communicator of the Year Award and IWC Personality of the Year. In 2018 Joe was named 22nd in the 100 Most Influential People in Wine by Drinks Retailing News, the highest placed media figure on the list.

It's an unlikely career for someone who began as a university academic.

Between researching his MPhil on Food & Religion and teaching Structuralist Food Theory and Hotel Valuation Models, Joe wrote the world’s first textbook on selling and marketing wine in restaurants. A book still used in universities over 20 years later.

In 2016 he was a nominee for the Wine and Spirit Education Trust Outstanding Alumni Award. This is a new annual accolade to celebrate a WSET Diploma graduate who is notably contributing to the industry.

You can follow Joe on Instagram here @joefattorini.

Highlights + Notables:

Obi Wine Kenobi runs Marathon du Médoc.

PixWine: Pix is the world's first wine discovery platform with a simple matchmaking mission: to pair people with bottles that bring them joy.

Wine choice is situational: "Middle-aged English businessmen, their palates apparently changed at Waterloo Station."

Stated preferences vs. Revealed preferences

Social capital is "the networks of relationships among people who live and work in a particular society, enabling that society to function effectively." In The Forms of Capital, Pierre Bourdieu distinguishes between three forms of capital: economic capital, cultural capital, and social capital.

James Bond has saved the world and beaten the bad buys because of his wine knowledge.

James Bond: The wine is quite excellent. Although for such a grand meal, I would have expected a claret.

Mr. Wint: But of course. Unfortunately, our cellar is poorly stocked with clarets.

James Bond: Mouton Rothschild IS a claret. And, I've smelled that aftershave before, and both times - I've smelled a rat.

-- Diamonds Are Forever

Read: Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference - Judea Pearl

"A lot of people aren't looking for the best wine; they are looking for the guaranteed not shit one."

Binge-watching Netflix for a living: How a Netflix tagger helps you discover new shows: The good, the bad, and the boring kids' stuff of metadata analysis for a streaming service. Toms Guide

The most magical place on Earth: Inside the great NBA bubble experiment. GQ - Taylor Rooks

What is mimetic theory? COV&R

Read: Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life - Luke Burgis

Explore vs. Exploit

How people decide what to buy lies in the 'messy middle' of the purchase journey Google

Google's new 'messy middle' — what's it all about? Nick Barthram

Monty Python: The upper-class twit of the year YouTube

Veblen good: Type of luxury good for which the demand for a good increases as the price increases, in apparent (but not actual) contradiction of the law of demand, resulting in an upward-sloping demand curve. The higher prices of Veblen goods may make them desirable as a status symbol in conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure practices.

The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions (1899) is a treatise of economics and sociology written by the Norwegian-American economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen.

The 1855 Bordeaux Classification: The ranking system put in place by Napoleon III still influences today's market. Wine Spectator

Decanting the meteoric rise of Whispering Angel: Sacha Lichine teaches us all to embrace La Vie En Rosé. Gentleman's Journal