Two weeks, not five

A wine shop owner emailed to tell me we'd got a wine wrong. It was the first reply to the first batch of cold emails I'd sent. Not quite the start I'd planned.

Quick context. I'm building an extra service for Sommly, called Sommly Shelf. Most independent wine shops list hundreds of bottles with the importer's one-line blurb copied straight off the sheet, because nobody has time to write four hundred descriptions. So we write them. Either as the finished description, or as a placeholder a shop can run until they've had time to taste the bottle and write their own, so the page isn't sat there with a bare importer one-liner, quietly costing them search ranking and sales. Either way, the whole thing rests on one promise: the facts come from real wine data - we don't invent anything. Wine people would clock an invented fact in about half a second.

So I rewrote one of his wines as a free sample. An Austrian skin-contact white. And in the copy we said it spent five weeks on the skins.

He wrote back: it's two weeks, not five. Five weeks would be deep into orange wine territory, not the in-between style you've described.

Fair enough. And here's the part that actually frustrated me. It wasn't us making something up. We'd pulled the "five weeks" claim from a respected wine writer's published note on that exact bottle, from a few weeks earlier. A real, citable source. Trouble is, his "two weeks" came from someone who actually knows the wine first-hand, not a webpage. Same wine, two numbers, and the one that was easiest to find online was the one that turned out to be off.

So we spent the day fixing it. Re-checked every other sample against the merchants' own listings, found two more soft spots and fixed those too. Built a check that now refuses to let a description claim a maceration time, an ABV, a sweetness level, anything, it couldn't ground in a real source. Added a small "sources used" line under every rewrite, so a shop can see exactly where each fact came from.

He wasn't especially warm about it. Bit of a dig in the reply, my own "we don't make things up" line more or less handed back to me - and a bit of sarcasm when you're trying to help does wind me up a little bit.

Still, having someone who actually knows the wine read it closely enough to argue beats a dozen polite "looks great" replies from people who don't. Changed it the same day. That's the job.