With 'recommendation' you mean tasting? Otherwise i don't see a necessity for a physical process.
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I suspect that a lot of it is just about the opportunity to shoot the breeze with a salesperson who shares your passion.
In principle, you could make this work over something like video chat, but in practice I just don't see that working.
From the article:
> We always knew that people bought this wine for fun.
> The buying process, and talking to others about the wine,
> turns out to be part of that fun.
If you have not tasted that exact label from that exact winery, you have no idea what you are getting. Same grape, same winery, same year is not necessarily good enough, especially when dealing with interesting and not well known wineries.
Yeah, that's kind of what I'm getting at. Sometimes it involves tasting, but not normally.
In particular, I enjoy getting to know the people who work at a local establishment and understand their taste. For instance, when it came to fine teas, I got to know one tea merchant well enough that she'd say, "This new green came in and I hated it! I thought you'd love it!" because we had entirely opposite tastes when it came to the astringent characteristics of tea. (Think a Pi Lo Chun versus a Sencha, for instance.)
While we are getting better at recommendations, the best salespeople still have a better understanding of what makes you like a product than "people like you also purchased..." algorithms. This may be particularly important in markets that are about different things for different consumers: wine selection may be about taste, or it may be about social signaling. Same is true in the transaction: it may be about the best price, building a relationship, having a relaxing escape (buying cigars, for instance), or any number of other things.
Even when salespeople don't have a better understanding of your tastes they're more likely to be persuasive and more likely to add the perceived value to it... a salesperson who admits to hating something she recommends is a more memorable and compelling call to action than an algorithm
I'm sure Amazon's algorithms often do have a better idea of what I'd enjoy than many of my friends, but friends' recommendations are still more likely to induce me to act than a personalised promo email.