Christine Nysæther writes Christine was born and raised in Johannesburg, South Africa, where her love of wine began on the wild western coast and deepened when she married a local sommelier. Now based in Norway, she is co-founder of the country’s only academic wine tasting society. Her writing celebrates the human side of wine: place, craft, conversation and the joy of sharing remarkable bottles around the table.
The bottle my AI would never find
It is an unusually warm Friday night in southern Norway. The continent is facing yet another heatwave: record temperatures, warnings, and water shortages. But here in Norway, it is eerily calm. The sun is shining, and the wind has softened over the ocean.
Like many Friday nights, I have poured myself a glass of Riesling — the wine I have learned pairs best with the moment the week finally lets go. Something about its minerality and precision cuts through the residue of the week. The faint diesel notes remind me of the traffic I have left behind as I enter the weekend.
Tonight, I am contemplating something a little different with my wine. Not tomorrow’s plans, or the wedding anniversary gift I have yet to purchase. I am wondering about the AI agent I left behind when I closed my laptop a few hours ago.
I have worked all week supported by this little AI agent. Who knows, maybe it is much larger in reality, but in my mind it is small, polite, helpful, and smart in a quiet way. It has the answer, but it never makes me feel less equipped to think through the solution myself.
I wonder what my AI agent is pairing its Friday night with. What does it uncork to unwind at the end of the week?
It, like me, has also worked hard all week, handling requests and tasks, with very few grateful answers or encouraging words in return. And then a strange sadness hits me. If I were to imagine a world where my agent could enjoy a bottle, it would probably choose one from the database of rated wineries, often with the highest marketing budgets and the biggest scores. The ones that can sometimes carry ordinary wine on the strength of brand recognition.
After all, what would my AI agent tell me are the best wines to pair with a Friday night? Maybe it would turn up bottles promoted on TikTok or by social media influencers barely old enough to drink wine. I am sure popular and large-scale commercial wines with great ratings would overshadow lesser-known and smaller producers, who are often some of the real gems in the wine industry.
Just the thought of this sobers my Friday night. Because if the joy of my AI agent’s Friday night wine pairing were defined by trends, it would miss so much of the beauty found in a chilled glass resting on the table.
Take for example the wine I have paired with this warm and calm Friday night: a Riesling from the small town of Piesport, in the Mosel, Germany, close to the Luxembourg border. The producer is Weingut Lothar Kettern. It is a 2019 Trocken Riesling — dry, with a few more years than average for a Riesling, yet still fresh and crisp. It has notes of green apple, citrus, wet slate, and a gentle floral undertone, although I must admit that last note might be coming from the flowers blooming around me.
The first time I tasted this wine was at a wine club meeting in town. It was fantastic. It opened up a minerality and complexity I had never before tasted in a Riesling. It was so good that we emailed the producer, drove down to the Mosel, and sat around their dining room table tasting 15 of their wines while sharing stories and reflections. We slept in their childhood home and ate breakfast with the vineyard’s founder, now-retired father.
They spoke about their passion: how they choose to leave the wine in barrels much longer than usual, much to their bank manager’s and father’s dismay; how the roots of the vines stretch deep, cracking and pushing through the slate-based earth, on slopes that seem impossible to traverse; how they hand-pick the grapes and discard any with even the lightest imperfections.
With children running around, the winemaker, Philipp Kettern, stood with soil still on his hands, explaining the value of partnerships between wineries, wine regions, and experts. For them in particular, it was a chance meeting and a long mentorship with the famed Portuguese producer Dirk van der Niepoort that gave them the courage to push against standard wine practices, innovate, and find their own voice.
This is the wine I am pairing with my Friday night. For me, it speaks not only of passion and purpose, but also of the drive to dig deep against resistance and dare to try something new. It does not matter how long the week has been at my slightly mundane nine-to-five job. There is still someone out there who woke up with a dream they were not willing to compromise on. Just knowing that mere fact brings a smile to my face.
My AI agent can retrieve consensus, but it simply cannot create intimacy. It can search, compare, and recommend. But it cannot see through the noise quite the way we can. It has no palate of its own, only the borrowed palates of everyone else.
It will never be able to fall in love with a bottle because it once sat in a dining room, sharing a moment with a winemaker who still had fresh soil under his nails, holding on to his stubborn refusal to make something merely marketable.
How thin a Friday night glass of wine becomes when it is filled only with other people’s opinions.
The image is the author’s own.
Published unedited and in accordance with the rules of the competition published here.
