How It Works
Sommate is a machine learning recommendation system with a sommelier on top.
Not an LLM wrapper. Most wine apps take your question, hand it to a chatbot, and call it a day. Sommate doesn't. We combine real machine learning trained on your reviews with classic sommelier knowledge — and a few hard rules a chatbot can't make.
The approach
What Makes Sommate Different
01
Trained on you
Every wine you rate trains the model on your palate. The engine looks beyond a few sliders — it understands the qualitative character of wines you've loved (regional style, winemaking signature, idiomatic flavor) and finds more like them.
02
Honest about what it knows
New users get classical sommelier picks. Veteran users get heavily personalized ones. Sommate knows the difference and won't pretend to know your taste before you've taught it.
03
Pushes your palate forward
Your “Expand Your Palate” pick is never random. It's the next wine worth knowing — guided toward varieties a serious drinker should try, that still pair with tonight's meal.
The architecture
Two Specialties, One Recommendation
The wave of LLM apps that launched over the last two years mostly do one thing: take your question and forward it to a chatbot with a clever system prompt. They're fast to build. They're also indistinguishable from each other, because the chatbot is doing all the thinking.
Sommate uses a language model only where it adds genuine value — as a sommelier evaluating wines against a dish, and as a writer explaining a pick. Everything else is real engineering: machine learning trained on your reviews, data-science guarantees about diversity and confidence, and deterministic logic that runs in milliseconds and never wavers.
Sommelier knowledge and personalization are independent dimensions. We treat them that way.
The hard rules
Guarantees a Prompt Can't Make
These are mathematical guarantees, not soft preferences. Sommate does not ship a recommendation that violates them.
Three different wines, always
No single grape can claim all three slots if the menu has alternatives. Three perspectives on one meal — Sommate's Pick, Aligns With Your Taste, Expand Your Palate.
Listens to what you don't like
Repeated low ratings of a varietal or region veto that style from your “Aligns With Your Taste” slot — until the pattern reverses.
Recent ratings count more
Old preferences fade automatically. The engine tracks how your palate is evolving, not just where it started — so the recommendations stay current with you.
Never frames a pick as a compromise
Recommendations don't reference numeric scores or trade-offs. Three confident picks, three different perspectives — every time.
Why this matters
What This Means for You
Anyone can spin up a chatbot and ask it for wine pairings. That's not what we built. Sommate gets sharper the more you use it, knows what it doesn't know, and is structurally incapable of giving you three of the same wine.
The result is a recommendation engine that feels like having a sommelier who's been quietly studying your palate for years.
Try It on Your Next Wine List
Available now on iPhone. The more you rate, the smarter it gets.
Available on iPhone and Android