Under the Hood of Sommo
How Sommo identifies wines, estimates when to drink them, learns your palate, and keeps recommendations honest. The methodology behind the app, in plain language.
Most wine apps show you the benefit and hide the method. This part of the site does the opposite. I am Gökhan, and I build Sommo on my own, so I can afford to be candid about how it works. Sommo is not a single-feature tool that scans a label and stops. It is a full wine journey: you scan a bottle, journal what you taste, learn through guided lessons and WSET prep, track a cellar, and let Sommo AI quietly learn your palate as you go. Every one of those surfaces runs on the same wine-tuned model I built, and the same hand-maintained library of real wines.
These pages explain how each piece works, what it weighs when it makes a call, and just as importantly, where it stops. No jargon, no provider names, no overclaiming. If a recommendation rests on an assumption, I say so. If Sommo can’t know something, like how your bottle was stored before it reached you, I say that too. Because there is no growth team to please and no investors to impress, honest wine help can mean exactly that: showing the method, not just the answer.
Eight things worth explaining.
How label scanning works
Point a camera at a bottle and Sommo tells you what is in the glass. Here is how it gets from a photo to an answer, and why it does not invent …
Read → 02AgeingHow drinking windows work
When should you open it? Sommo answers with a window, not a single year, and tells you how sure it is. Here is how the dates are built and where they …
Read → 03PersonalisationHow Sommo learns your palate
Vivino tells you what the crowd thinks. Sommo AI learns what you think, and notices when that changes. Here is how your own journal becomes a living …
Read → 04Food and wineHow cellar pairing works
You own dozens of bottles and you are cooking one dinner. Cellar pairing reads what you actually have and tells you which to open, and why.
Read → 05Ordering outHow menu scoring works
A long wine list and a waiter waiting. Menu scoring reads the whole page and tells you which bottles are the smart order, before you have to decide.
Read → 06Exam prepHow WSET adaptive study works
Specialist apps charge per level and stop at flashcards. Here is how Sommo schedules your revision, grades your free-text answers like an examiner, …
Read → 07TrustPrivacy and data ownership
Your journal is yours. Here is exactly what Sommo keeps, what it refuses to do with it, and how to take it all with you or delete it.
Read → 08HonestyWhat Sommo cannot know
The most useful page on this site. Every honest tool has edges, and here are Sommo's, written down on purpose rather than buried in the small print.
Read →A wine app should make the next bottle better than the last. If it does anything else, it's in the way.
Gökhan Arkan · Maker of Sommo · Read the full story →
For the engineers.
If you want the technical write-ups rather than the plain-language version, I document two on my personal blog: the Sommo model and the wine knowledge graph that grounds it. The graph pipeline is open-sourced on GitHub if you want to inspect the engineering yourself.
Everything else on this site stays in plain language on purpose. The pages above explain what Sommo does, what it weighs, and where it stops, without the jargon.
Honest wine help, in your pocket.
Sommo is free to download, with five label scans to start. Premium unlocks every feature for less than a bottle of decent wine per month.