When Harry Met Sally and the now famous line “I’ll have what she’s having” was just getting cultural traction, the Internet was still some nerdy DARPA project hardy anyone knew about. Trillions of Web searches later, we’ve all learned the usefulness of the ‘more like this’ query. Your job is to find just one thing that exactly hits the spot. Once you’ve got it, you just ask for more results that deliver similar goods. You might call this the “I’ll Have What I’m Having, Only Different” query.
In situations where you don’t have an algorithm to lean on, the process becomes rather more challenging. Say you find a wine you particularly enjoy. What are the parameters that will return others which are similar but not identical to it, and which you would also presumably enjoy?
There are some obvious ways of going about this. You could sample other wines from the same producer, or from other producers in the same region, or just wines made with the same grape or blend of grapes. You might have some success this way. Each is a reasonable strategy, likely to have value in terms of context and experience, even if failing to deliver that magical Meg Ryan moment. When they don’t, it may be because the thing you’re after is something less obvious and less tangible than any of these — its determining factors multiple, minute, even idiosyncratic. I like to call it temperament.
Where an algorithm would be looking to extract matching features, of the kind listed above, as a way of giving you ‘more like this,’ temperament has as its focus aspects such as scale, proportion, volume, duration, sapidity (an old timey term I love, referring to flavor intensity), freshness and drinkability — all comprising a generalized, high-level, birds-eye view of the wine, rather than a set of discrete features.
You, Canny Reader, may now be on the point of suggesting we compile a catalogue of wine temperaments. But to do that would, I fear, just throw us back into algorithm territory. Taking the measure of temperament is a job for humans, employing human judgement aided and abetted by attention, experience, memory and a hunch or two.
So, don’t be surprised if the next time you ask one of us in the wine corner for ‘more like this,’ we suggest something having nothing obvious in common with the exemplar. It is, after all, how Harry met Sally.