Following the American-Croatian wine writer Miquel Hudin, Henry Jeffreys was the first of my colleagues on this side of the pond to suggest that a major wine writing prize – the 67 Pall Mall Global Wine Communicator Award for short-form writing – had been awarded to a piece of prose that was either substantially or entirely AI-generated. When I read the piece – by the influencer Fikayo Ifaturoti – which compared a bottle of Bollinger VVF 1969 to a Stradivarius violin, I found myself agreeing with Hudin, Jeffreys, and other colleagues including Alice Feiring, Tim Atkin and Felicity Carter. It had, as Jeffreys pointed out, several telltale signs of AI prose – the “rule of three”, very short verbless sentences, the “it’s not one thing it’s another” construction. Beyond that there was the surface sheen and even impressiveness which on closer inspection revealed a lack of coherence or even, eventually, meaning. Jeffreys put the piece through the AI writing detector Pangram which adjudged it 100% AI-generated.

Jeffreys approached both Ifaturoti and the founder of the 67 Pall Mall Awards judges, Richard Hemming, for comment. Ifaturoti has maintained a sphinxlike silence. Hemming doubled down on the judges’ decision, saying he did not believe the piece was AI-generated and in any case the allegation was impossible to prove, as AI writing detectors were notoriously unreliable.

Another wine writer, Alder Yarrow, coming in on the side of Jeffreys et al, picked apart that defence. Yarrow has extensive experience of using AI writing detectors in education work, and believes the best of them, especially GPTZero, are highly reliable if not utterly infallible. He put Ifaturoti’s piece, and the other five articles short-listed for the award, through GPTZero: hers came back as 100%-AI written, the other five as 100% human-written.

I am not an expert in AI writing detection, but I did spend quite a lot of my youth studying English literature, and subsequently became among other things a theatre critic and book reviewer. Literary criticism, in other words, is what I was trained to do and am still fascinated by. The most influential literary critic in England when I was growing up and studying English at Cambridge University was F.R. Leavis, whose idea of both criticism and literature had a strong moral component. While enjoining close attention to the text, Leavis looked at literature in the context of larger dimensions, the world, life, society, truth, including the truth of feeling. Literature, and literary criticism, were both serious matters, involving a person bringing to bear their intelligence, thoughtfulness, sensitivity, scrupulousness care, and unique sensibility, expressed in literary style, on some aspect of the world, reality, society.

Now all this may seem impossibly high-falutin as well as unfashionable, and irrelevant to the award of a wine writing prize. But amid all the furore about whether Ifaturoti’s piece was AI-generated, not much attempt has been made to look at it in the light of this kind of literary criticism.

Her piece is really an extended analogy, comparing a bottle of Bollinger VVF 1969 (a vintage champagne made from a tiny plot of pre-phylloxera vines) to a Stradivarius violin. Her argument is that both are survivals from a former world – a world, in the case of the Strad, with a different climate, a world, in the case of the Bollinger, before the vine aphid phylloxera vastatrix crossed the Atlantic and necessitated the grafting of European vines onto American rootstocks. As a result, both are unique and unreproducible. The argument has a certain seductiveness, but it falls apart on closer inspection, or if pondered a little more deeply.

A bottle of champagne is not really like a violin. An interesting debate can be held about whether a wine can be, in a certain sense, an artwork. But a Stradivarius violin is, essentially, an instrument, not an artwork. A Strad is only as good as the player who plays it; a mediocre violinist will still sound mediocre on a Strad.

There is, however, one way in which a Strad resembles a bottle of Bollinger VVF. Both are rare and extremely expensive. A bottle of VVF will set you back around £1000 (quite pricey for a bottle of wine); a Strad will cost you several million pounds. Here I think is the key to Ifaturoti’s text and what lies behind it. Whether or not it was AI-generated, it is not a serious attempt to illuminate something about the world, reality, music, wine, but a piece of specious promotional puffery designed to impart a spurious sheen of glamour. That kind of writing, whether done by a machine or a human, shouldn’t win prizes. The thought that it might have taken Claude or one of his friends about 30 seconds to compose, without any of what TS Eliot in ‘East Coker’ called “the intolerable wrestle with words and meanings”, merely adds insult to injury.