Under the Hood of Sommo on Sommo — AI Wine Scanner, WSET Prep & Wine Journal App

How Label Scanning Works

Sat, 20 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Label scanning is Sommo’s front door. You point a camera at a bottle and, a moment later, you have the producer, the region, the grape, a tasting profile, a drinking window, and food pairings. The interesting part is not that it reads the label. Plenty of apps do that. The interesting part is what happens between the photo and the answer, and the rule that stops the app from making things up.

How Drinking Windows Work

Sat, 20 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

“When should I drink this?” is the question a wine label never answers. Sommo answers it with a window, a span of years rather than a single date, because that is how wine actually behaves. A great Barolo from Nebbiolo does not become “ready” on one Tuesday and “over” on another. It climbs, plateaus, and declines. The window describes the whole arc.

Why a window, not a year

A single “drink by” year is precise and usually wrong. Wine ageing is a curve, not a deadline. Sommo describes that curve so you can plan: open the youngest bottles of a case first, hold the rest, and catch each one near its best.

How Sommo Learns Your Palate

Sat, 20 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Most wine apps answer “what should I drink?” with a crowd score. Sommo AI answers it with you. The longer you use it, the better it knows your palate, not because it watched what strangers rated, but because it read your own journal. This is the quiet engine under the whole app, and it is built entirely from wines you have actually tasted. It is also the feature I am proudest of, so let me explain why I built it the way I did.

How Cellar Pairing Works

Sat, 20 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A wine shop pairing is generic by necessity: it knows the dish, not your shelves. Cellar pairing closes that gap. You describe what you are cooking, and Sommo recommends from the bottles you actually own. Not “a Syrah would be nice”, but “open the bottle on the second rack”. That is a different, and far more useful, kind of answer.

The problem with generic pairings

Search “wine with lamb” and you get a grape. Helpful, until you are standing in front of your own collection with no Syrah in sight and three other reds you forgot you had. The gap between a textbook pairing and a decision about your shelves is exactly where most advice stops being useful. Cellar pairing starts there.

How Menu Scoring Works

Sat, 20 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A restaurant flips the question. At home you ask “what is this wine?”. At the table, surrounded by an unfamiliar list and a waiter hovering, you ask “which of these should I order?”. Menu scoring is built for that exact moment: it reads the whole list and does the comparing for you, so the homework is done before anyone comes back to take the order.

A different question

Scanning a single bottle identifies one wine. A wine list is a dozen decisions at once, often with names you do not know and prices that range from fair to optimistic. Menu scoring exists because picking from a list is a different job from knowing a label, and it deserves its own tool.

How WSET Adaptive Study Works

Sat, 20 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

WSET is where Sommo goes deepest, because exam study is where a wine app can save you the most money and the most wasted hours. Specialist study apps charge fifty to two hundred dollars per level. Sommo Premium is a fraction of that, and it does more than flip cards. Here is how the studying actually works, level by level, mode by mode.

What Sommo covers

The full ladder, Levels 1 to 4, each with the same toolkit:

Privacy and Data Ownership

Sat, 20 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Trust in a wine app comes down to a simple question: what happens to everything you log? Sommo’s answer, in plain language, is that your journal is yours. This page is the readable summary; the full privacy policy is the legal version, and nothing here should contradict it.

What Sommo stores

To do its job, Sommo keeps:

Your journal: ratings, tasting notes and the wines you have logged.
Your cellar: the bottles you track and their details.
Your WSET progress: mastery, schedules and exam history.
Account basics and device tokens for the notifications you opt into.

Wine label images are the deliberate exception. They are processed in real time to read the label and are not stored afterwards. The scan is a means to an end, not a photo library I keep.

What Sommo Cannot Know

Sat, 20 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The best methodology pages spend as much ink on what a model cannot know as on what it can. So does this one. I build Sommo to be genuinely useful, which means being genuinely honest about its edges. Here they are, in plain sight.

AI is guidance, not oracle

Sommo is a very well-read assistant, not an infallible one. It can sharpen your choice, explain a region, and point you at the right bottle far faster than you could alone. It cannot taste your specific bottle, on this night, with this meal, through your palate. Always trust your own glass over the app. The recommendation is a starting point; you are the judge.