How Virgin Wines Uses Preferabli to Pick Your Perfect Wine

AI is uncorking a new era in wine marketing, pouring a generous vintage for those who say “wine is the answer, but was the question?” 

Virgin Wines, one of the UK's largest consumer online wine retailers, has partnered with Preferabli to offer tailored recommendations that suit the tongue of wine lovers. 

With the commitment to understand each customer’s unique taste, Preferabli – a leading AI-driven, product discovery and recommendation software – can guide consumers to wines they are most likely to enjoy. 

“Our ambition is to create a shopping journey that feels personal, intelligent and uniquely supportive of each customer’s tastes,” says Danny Cooper, Chief Information and Digital Officer at Virgin Wines. 

“Preferabli’s industry-leading, machine-learning technology enables Virgin Wines to deliver a more intuitive, relevant and confidence-building experience at every touchpoint.” 

What is sensorial AI and how AI it transforms food & wine recommendations

Sensorial AI is an AI system that is developed to understand and model human taste, aroma and texture preference. 

Each food and beverage item can be broken down into its constituent sensory attributes which can be tagged. 

For wines, this includes acidity, sweetness, tannin structure, body and flavour profiles. 

Using this data and advanced ML systems, bottles of wines can be classified based on how they actually taste. 

Preferabli delivers personalised recommendations to consumers using their proprietary sensorial AI model that uses their large dataset on the inventory to match them with individual user signals. 

This includes guided questionnaires designed to elucidate taste preferences, specific search requests as well as, purchase, rating and search histories to create recommendations that best suit each customer.  

“We’re imagining a world driven by individual preferences, using machine intelligence with human touch,” says Pam Dillon, Co-Founder and CEO of Preferabli.

“We’re very excited to be partnering with Virgin Wines, who is truly leading thinking on what it means to create personalised, vibrant digital experiences.”

From Data to Decanter: AI‑Driven Personalisation as a Marketing Advantage 

The first phase of this long-term digital transformation strategy of Virgin Wines will start with personalised email campaigns that will offer the WineBank customers a selection of wine recommendations that are based on their individual flavour profiles. 

“Preferabli’s machine-learning platform gives us the capability to do that at scale,” Danny says.

With a dynamic, data-driven future in mind, this functionality will also be available across the upcoming Virgin Wine mobile app and website. 

With dedicated tools to choose the right wine for the right moment, Danny believes Preferabli is uniquely suited to Virgin Wines’ ambition to modernise discovery and create a more engaging journey for every customer. 

AI tools like this can broadly help consumers avoid decision freeze when spoilt for choice in the elegant and intricate market of finely aged wines.