Wine Sommelier Robot: From Cellar Masters to ABB Arms

A wine sommelier robot needs to know wine and handle bottles. See sommelier history, Dreamforce's AI sommelier test and where ABB YuMi and GoFa could serve.

INDUSTRIAL ROBOTICS

Chat With Robot

10/19/20265 min read

A wine sommelier robot has to do two things a human sommelier does without thinking: know the wine and handle it. Recommending a bottle is now a software problem, and a recent test showed how far that software has come and where it slips. Serving the bottle is a handling problem, and that is where robot arms come in. This post covers the sommelier's history, the cellar machines that already exist, the news from Dreamforce, and where ABB's YuMi and GoFa could fit. ABB has no wine service product, so that part is a possibility.

Black and white photo of a man smelling a glass of red wine
Black and white photo of a man smelling a glass of red wine

A man smells a glass of red wine at a tasting, the skill a sommelier trains for. Photo: William Lawrence / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

How sommeliers came to run the wine cellar

The word sommelier is French and comes from Middle French, where it named a court official in charge of transporting supplies. It probably traces back to an Old Provencal word for a pack-animal driver. Over the centuries the job narrowed to wine. A modern sommelier builds the wine list, serves the wine, trains the floor staff and pairs bottles with the menu. Where a restaurant has no sommelier, the maitre d'hotel often covers the role, which shows how much of the job is plain service.

A waiter in a suit pouring red wine from a decanter at a dinner table
A waiter in a suit pouring red wine from a decanter at a dinner table

A sommelier pours wine from a decanter at a restaurant table. Photo: Jennifer / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

The profession built formal exams too. The Master Sommelier Diploma dates to 1969, and the Court of Master Sommeliers was established in 1977. Part of the training is memory: regions, vintages and producers, along with how to smell and taste a glass and describe it. That knowledge is the part software copies most easily, because it is a large body of facts. The physical craft of decanting, pouring and handling old bottles is harder to copy, because every bottle, cork and glass is a little different and old bottles carry sediment that a careless pour will stir up.

A wine cellar with bottle racks on the walls and wooden crates in the middle
A wine cellar with bottle racks on the walls and wooden crates in the middle

A restaurant wine cellar in Yerevan with bottles racked on the walls. Photo: Benoit Prieur / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

Machines entered the cellar long before robots did. Wine dispensers such as the Enomatic units seen in upscale restaurants hold open bottles under inert gas and pour a measured glass at the press of a button. Coravin, invented by Greg Lambrecht and launched in 2013 according to Wine Spectator, goes further by drawing wine through the cork with a needle, so a bottle can be sampled without being opened. Neither machine picks, carries or serves a bottle. They keep wine in good condition and meter it out.

A long dim corridor lined with shelves of wine bottles
A long dim corridor lined with shelves of wine bottles

The wine cellar at Antoine's Restaurant in New Orleans, 2010. Photo: Gary J. Wood / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

What wine robots and AI sommeliers do now

The recent news comes from Dreamforce 2026. TechRadar described an AI sommelier session in which an agent named tAIster, trained on around 400,000 wines, tried to identify three mystery wines from the writer's descriptions of appearance, aroma and taste. It got the first two right. It missed the third, guessing Veuve Clicquot champagne instead of Chardonnay because the writer mentioned small bubbles. TechRadar's verdict on the results was mixed. The test also showed what such an agent works from: words. It never tasted anything, so it could only match the writer's description against what it had learned.

Stainless steel wine dispenser with eight bottles and price cards below
Stainless steel wine dispenser with eight bottles and price cards below

An Enomatic wine dispenser holding open bottles for pouring by the glass. Photo: Tomas er / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Robots that carry wine already exist in hotels. Rosé, a Savioke robot at Hotel Trio in Healdsburg, California, has delivered items including bottles of wine to guest rooms since 2018. It is about three feet tall, rides the lifts, calls the guest from the door and opens a lid to reveal the order. It cannot choose a wine or pour it, and it has no arm. It is a delivery robot, a different job from serving at the table, though it shows guests will accept a robot bringing them wine.

A tall tasting glass of white wine on a table outdoors
A tall tasting glass of white wine on a table outdoors

A glass of white wine at a tasting. Photo: Tim Parkinson / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

ABB's arms have served drinks before. A YuMi made coffee at the Smartech store in Selfridges, London, in 2018, and YuMi cobots finish burgers at BurgerBots in Los Gatos, California. Those jobs show that a dual-arm robot can work in front of customers. Wine adds weight, and that matters: a YuMi IRB 14000 carries about 0.5 kg per arm, too little for a full bottle, so a wine robot would need a GoFa CRB 15000, which carries 5 kg. We cover a related drink robot in our robot bartender post.

A dual arm ABB YuMi robot beside a coffee machine and a glass of water
A dual arm ABB YuMi robot beside a coffee machine and a glass of water

ABB's YuMi making coffee at the Smartech bar in Selfridges, London. Photo: ABB

What a wine robot would take in restaurants and at home

A realistic robot sommelier would split the work. Software would recommend and explain the wine, a cellar system would find the bottle, and an arm would fetch it, present the label and pour. A GoFa on a rail could pick bottles from racks, since its force sensing lets it work close to staff. Vision would read labels. Pouring a glass without a drip and decanting an old bottle with sediment are harder, and no source shows ABB hardware doing either, so treat this as an idea. Nobody has shown how well a collaborative arm copes with wet, slippery glass.

A dual arm ABB YuMi robot working over a food tray in a restaurant kitchen
A dual arm ABB YuMi robot working over a food tray in a restaurant kitchen

An ABB YuMi cobot finishing a burger at BurgerBots in Los Gatos, California. Photo: ABB

For restaurants the open problems are cost and trust. Guests come for the human at the table, who can read the mood of the room, and a robot that misreads a description, as tAIster did once, would lose the table's trust quickly. Safety matters near glass and diners, so an arm needs force limits and a risk assessment. Programs for a cell like this are normally built first in RobotStudio, which lets engineers test reach, speed and rack layout before a bottle is moved.

A white and grey ABB GoFa cobot arm beside a wooden work table
A white and grey ABB GoFa cobot arm beside a wooden work table

An ABB GoFa CRB 15000 cobot at a work table. Photo: ABB

For homes, the practical product is smaller. A countertop dispenser, a cellar with an automatic bottle picker and an app that recommends from your own stock is closer to what people will buy than a robot arm in the kitchen. The arm only makes sense once the robot can do other chores too, from loading the dishwasher to clearing the table. Wineries have their own automation, from vineyards to bottling, and we covered it in ABB PoWa cobots from vineyard to winery.

A white ABB GoFa arm reaching toward metal parts inside a machine
A white ABB GoFa arm reaching toward metal parts inside a machine

An ABB GoFa cobot loading parts into a machine at a small factory. Photo: ABB

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