When making wine, AI augments rather than replaces human expertise.

AI succeeds when it respects what makes us human.

Wine professionals correctly sense which AI applications honor their expertise and which threaten it.

My husband is a wine connoisseur. He can hold the glass properly, swizzle the liquid inside just right, and, after a sniff, knows a lot about the wine he will be drinking (or not, if it is corked). Now, he has a new companion to aid wine aficionados in this venture. It is AI.

A recent study (Festa G. and colleagues, 2025) examined how AI is transforming wine production and found that it can help enthusiasts like my husband enjoy wine more. I draw on my book, Inside the Head of a Collector: Neuropsychological Forces at Play (2019), for neuropsychological concepts.

Here's where neuropsychology enters the vineyard. The human brain's relationship with wine is deeply emotional and multisensory. When we taste wine, our orbitofrontal cortex integrates sensory information with memory and emotion; it's why a particular bottle might remind us of our grandmother's kitchen or that study-abroad summer in Tuscany. This neural complexity is what makes wine special, and it's also what makes AI's role in the industry controversial.

The researchers surveyed 31 Italian wine industry professionals (Italy was the world's leading wine producer at the time) to assess their attitudes toward AI adoption. The findings challenge our assumptions about tradition-bound industries rejecting technology. Approximately 29 percent already use AI for tasks such as grape monitoring and logistics management, and there's a widespread belief that AI will significantly expand across wine business operations within five years.

Six Flavors of AI in Wine Country

The study examined six "enabling........

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