I’m a little relieved that AI is not very good at wine maps or cartography in general. We’re not obsolete - yet! While extremely helpful for research and organizing data, it’s not so good at actually generating a map. Here are a few attempts using Claude (Opus 5.5), Firefly (Adobe’s AI) and ChatGPT (Luna 5.6). Each used the same prompt: “make a wine map of champagne”.
Claude:
Claude is our go-to AI for research, but its mapping skills are very primitive. The spatial relationships are OK, but the map it produced looks like a Visio flowchart.
Firefly:
Firefly produced the wildest result. For some reason, it’s a mashup of Champagne and Bordeaux in an Old West style – a complete hallucination!
ChatGPT:
At first, ChatGPT couldn’t complete the image generation and said the image it attempted to make may have violated copyright. On the second attempt, it made the most professional-looking map of the bunch. Still, its specific boundaries are completely off, and the Grand Cru/Premier Cru designations it volunteered are all wrong. (I know the Côte des Bar would love to have a few Grand and Premier Cru villages!) One remarkable thing is the promotional language sprinkled throughout the map. At the bottom right it says “Different soils. Different grapes. One extraordinary wine.” And in The Champagne Style Box it finishes with “Sparkling by nature, extraordinary by terroir.” Given that much cheesiness, you’d think it might volunteer some fromage pairings as well! It read like a very confident (and incompetent) intern trying to impress the boss.
For comparison's sake, here’s our Champagne map:
We’ll keep monitoring the situation. . .