Transcript
A (0:00)
Today we're diving into a really fascinating intersection of two worlds that don't often get talked about together. Fine wine and data science. Welcome to the Harvard Data Science Review. I'm Liberty Capito, the feature editor of the Harvard Data Science Review and I'm joined by my co host and editor in chief, Shalie Meng. If you've ever searched for a wine online, checked ratings, logged a bottle into your cellar or or looked for tasty notes from real people instead of critics, chances are that you've brushed up against Cellar Tracker. It's a platform with over a million users and billions of data points. Not just about wines, but about human taste, behavior and culture really. And at the center of it all is one person. Eric Levine, Cellar Tracker's founder. What really started as a personal tool for managing his own wine collection has grown into one most influential wine communities in the world. In this episode we'll talk about how data can tell us stories about how we drink and why, how machine learning might help us discover our next favorite bottle and how a passion project truly became a global phenomenon. So pour yourself a glass of wine and let's get into it.
B (1:27)
Well, Eric, so good to see you again and thank you again for joining the vine to mind back in was June now, right? And thanks for that fascinating closing keynote where you talk quite a bit about the history of how you start the Seller tracker. So my first question, because I want our listener to benefit from your rich experience, can you share us a little bit about how you started thing particularly at the time words like a big data community driven platforms were not buzzwords. So you were really a pioneer. So tell our audience how do you start it? How do you even have the idea?
C (2:07)
So Seller Tracker was an accident that started in 1999 and two things happened that year. One, if you ever I was working at Microsoft from 92 until 2005 and there was a point in time when we started doing an error. We basically created an error reporting a way for people if the software crashed to basically vote on their crash. And so if you ever saw when it would say send error report, don't send, that was me and three guys in the Office team who decided crashes suck and we're going to let the world tell us about them and we're going to use that to systematically change how we build and service our software at Microsoft. So that was thing one. Thing two was my wife and I went on a bicycling trip in Tuscany. And you know, at that point I enjoyed wine. I didn't know much about wine. And it was sort of one of those things on my bucket list, like, someday I want to learn about wine, but it's a very intimidating topic. And so on the second night of that trip, after a long, tough bike ride, we were up in Castellina, in Chianti. They had a merchant come, and he poured us four wines. The Chianti Classico, a Chianti Classico Reserva, a Vina Noble di Montepulciano, and a Brunello di Montalcino, which to me sounded like complete gobbledygook at the time. But he explained it's four wines all made from basically the same grape or clones of it, something called Sangiovese. And where we were in Castellina and Chianti, you could actually see Portugal, parts of Montepulciano and Montalcino in the background. And we spent the next four days, we biked to both of those. We biked in the valley. And he basically explained four wines made from the same grape, one hill, the other hill, down in the valley, in the heart of the valley. And I would naturally assume they would all taste identical. And of course, they were completely distinct. And my mind was blown. And in tech speak, I kind of had my bit flip moment. And then you spend a week biking around Tuscany, and it's magic. And so anyway, I get home, and then over the course of the next couple years, two bottles in the basement became 20, became 200, became 700. My day job is dealing with mining and basically crowdsourced big data for software reliability. And I'm keeping this growing seller in a spreadsheet. And all respect to the Excel guys I worked on Office, I worked with them. It's a great tool. It's a crappy database. And so I had a picture in my head of a proper, normalized database that would let me keep track of my collection and also wines that I had tasted. And so seller track was born when I was on sabbatical in 2003, literally as a tool for myself. I happened to show it to two friends who immediately said, I want to use that. Which I was like, oh, I hadn't thought of that. I got them on there, and then I realized overnight, three people could be 300, 3,000 or whatever. And now, 22 and a half years later, I'm still struggling to catch up.
