> ## Content Index
> Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.oliphonic.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further.

# Side hustle #2: AI wine matchmaking (part 1)
- URL: https://www.oliphonic.com/side-hustle-2-ai-wine-matchmaking-part-1/
- Published: 2026-09-28T18:08:09.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-28T18:11:06.000Z
- Author: Oliphonic

A brief post for tonight but thought I'd detail some early travails on another side-hustle / experiment of mine: **an AI-powered wine match-making service.**

The premise is quite simple - I use AI to help match customers to the wines that are going to hit the spot. Be it an occasion, a particular meal, a gnawing desire, whatever really.

The setup (in principle) is also quite simple - navigate to the website and you are greeted by an AI wine concierge who warmly asks you to offer up what your wine needs are - *"describe a mood, a meal, or a taste - trust me, I'll find the perfect match"*. The customer then engages in a little bit of back & forth with the agent - it might clarify any particular varietals or regions you might prefer, but ultimately it ends up with a top wine recommendation for your needs. Even better, while this is going on, it has compared prices across all major UK retailers and sourced you the best price to buy it. One click through to the merchant website and that's one happy customer.

I feel like a good USP here is bringing out background & history for the wines it selects. I haven't figured out the best way to harvest this data yet but really making the recommendation thoughtful, knowledgeable & personal feels like the best way forward.

So what have I managed so far (a messy list but bear with me):

- **chatGPT built the website for me** \- quite a bit of re-prompting, but I've landed on something that's really nice (I'll add a sneak peek below).
- **chatGPT scraped an initial first pass of data for me -** 419 wines across 13 retailers spanning red, white, rose, champagne etc.
- I had to set up a chatGPT Developer account and create an API for the chat capability - I decided to go with **GPT 6 Luna** as a good trade-off between accuracy, speed & price.
- A moderate amount of 'fine-tuning' of the chat capability was needed - I had a few rather hilarious examples of a downbeat AI bot depressedly exclaiming *"I cannot find any good wines to accompany your planned curry night - even the reds I have just simply wouldn't cope with the breadth of spices! :("*

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/9c/fa/9cfabe9c-bcc0-471f-a6fa-271bee166fa4/content/images/2026/09/ChatGPT-Image-Sep-28--2026--07_02_12-PM.png)

"Sir, I just cannot match the appropriate wine to your meal - I have failed you!"

But ultimately I've got a (very) shaky first draft sorted.

**However, here comes the difficult parts.**

- Turns out wines are complex. Trying to get to a canonical catalogue of wines (think same varietal but different vintage) is probably borderline impossible unless I was willing to get proper data engineering support & spend £££. There are options to harvest existing Wine Catalogue APIs (I know right, can you believe it) but they're not cheap - I think they start from $150 per month.
- There is potential for retailers to get tetchy about scraping their data. In fact some appear to have explicit T&Cs against this (for any retailers reading this, cool your beans, this is an experiment, it's not commercialised). There is optionality to engage each retailer separately to gain express permission... feels like a lot of effort though.
- How can I make sure my data is really up-to-date. I explored a batch job running every 48 hours to get the latest prices - which could work, but scraping feels clunky compared to an API call.

Putting these hard bits aside.... it's been pretty eye-opening a) how complex the world of wine is and b) how utterly brilliant chatGPT was at spinning this up at pace for me. I still think there's legs here (excuse the pun) and will keep at it for the moment.

I'll post as soon as I can about Part 2 of the great wine side-hustle!

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/9c/fa/9cfabe9c-bcc0-471f-a6fa-271bee166fa4/content/images/2026/09/Screenshot-2026-09-28-185530.png)

a sneak peak...