Picture this…
You're standing in the wine aisle. There's a wall of bottles in front of you, languages you don't speak, organised by regions you couldn't place on a map, described in tasting notes that mention crushed gravel and forest floor. You've got about ninety seconds before you need to be somewhere. You grab the bottle with the prettiest label and hope for the best.
This is most people's relationship with wine.
Not the sommeliers and not the enthusiasts, but the rest of us who just want a bottle we'll like for under $20 and don't fancy a forty-minute crash course in French regional geography to get there.
Theodora solves that exact problem via a personalised wine recommendation app, founded by Jess Thevenoz, that gives you a wine pick based on what you actually like and what's actually in stock at a shop near you.
You shouldn't need to know anything about wine to find a wine you love, and Theodora is built around that idea.
What is Theodora?
Theodora is an app that recommends a bottle of wine for you to buy without all the headache.
You don't need to know anything about grapes, regions, vintages, or tasting notes to use it. You just need to have a rough idea of what you like, and Theodora handles the rest.
It's currently live in the US in partnership with Total Wine, with a restaurant pilot launching soon and UK expansion planned over the next year.
How does Theodora work?
You answer a handful of multiple-choice questions: budget, red or white, sweet or dry. The app matches your answers against the live inventory of a shop near you and gives you a few bottles you can actually go and buy that day.
The recommendations aren't just a generic "you'd probably like a Pinot Noir" answer, but a specific bottle on a specific shelf at a specific shop.
Theodora also remembers what you've liked and what you haven't, asking you fewer questions on each return visit, and learning your palate as you use it. The more you use it, the better it gets.
The wine-picking problem is even harder at a restaurant. You can't see the label, you've got a sommelier nudging you towards something pricier, and you're usually ordering for a table of people with different preferences. Theodora is launching a restaurant pilot soon to tackle exactly that.
What you won't find in the app are tasting notes, and that's entirely intentional, because tasting notes cause a whole other problem. If a label says strawberry and you don't taste strawberry, you assume something's wrong with you. If it says crushed gravel, you don't know whether to want it or run. Instead, Theodora gives you the bottle without making you perform a tasting ritual you didn't sign up for.
Meet the founder: Jess Thevenoz
What stood out about our conversation with Jess is that she's the founder of a wine app and she doesn't really care about wine. In fact she has had no formal exposure to the wine industry before building Theodora.
She'll tell you herself. "I never wanted to be a sommelier. I didn't want to learn about the jargon or the barrels or anything. I just wanted somebody that I could trust to pick a wine for me."
Instead, Jess's background is in data. She spent her career working out what information people needed to make a decision in front of them, and what was just noise.
Jess first had the idea for Theodora whilesShe was on her way to a friend's house for dinner. She was at a wine shop picking up a bottle, and realised that ten years of buying wine had left her no better at it than when she started.
Across the aisle, another shopper was doing the same dance. Pacing, picking up bottles, putting them back.
She realised she wasn't the only one struggling, there was something fundamentally wrong with shopping for wine, and she was going to build the solution.
Why we love Theodora
The wine industry has spent decades telling people that not knowing about wine is a personal failing. We think that's nonsense, and we think it's about time someone built a product that agreed. Theodora skips all the homework and just gives you something you'll like.
The other thing we keep coming back to is how focused it is. Theodora isn't trying to replace wine education or build a community for enthusiasts or out-rate Vivino.
It does one thing: gets you out of the wine aisle quickly with a bottle you'll like
We sat down with Jess to learn more about Theodora and how she's tackling a decades old problem with a modern, data led solution. You can listen to the full conversation on The Discovery Call podcast on Spotify or YouTube below.