Sommelia
Sommelia is an AI sommelier for restaurants. Diners scan a table-card QR code, describe what they are eating, and get a wine pairing drawn from the venue's own list, uploaded beforehand as an Excel or PDF file.
What is Sommelia?
Sommelia is an AI sommelier that restaurants put on their tables. The pitch runs in three steps: upload the wine list, put out the QR code, let the guest get a recommendation. A diner scans with a phone, describes what is on the plate, and receives a wine chosen from the venue's own list, with its region, vintage and a tasting note, rather than a suggestion from a generic catalogue.
The list goes in as an Excel or PDF file and is structured automatically; the food menu can be connected too, so the sommelier knows what the kitchen serves. The physical carrier is deliberately understated, described by the publisher as a table card, not a QR sign, designed to blend into the restaurant's aesthetic.
Five sommelier personas are presented. Sommelia herself is included on every plan and covers broad wine expertise from bistro to fine dining. Four specialists sit behind the Premium tier: Valentín for Spanish cooking (Rioja, Priorat, sherry, cava), Vincent for French (Burgundy, Bordeaux, Rhône, Champagne), Gavi for Italian (Barolo, Amarone, Vermentino, Etna Rosso) and Freyja for Nordic cooking, natural wines and seasonal produce. A bespoke persona can be built on request for a cuisine that is not covered.
The claimed benefits are selling more wine, taking pressure off the floor staff, keeping the list permanently current, installing nothing and answering in several languages, plus a PDF export of the list. Billing counts guest conversations: one whole exchange counts as one, however many messages it contains, capped at 1,500 a month on Genuine and 3,000 on Premium.
Underneath, the answers are generated by Anthropic's model (Anthropic PBC, United States, named in the subprocessor list), while the application and database run inside the EU at Hetzner Online GmbH in Germany. The marketing site and the product are two separate React single-page applications, sommelia.se and app.sommelia.se.
The positioning is narrow and explicit, AI sommelier for Sweden's restaurants, with a second Danish market configured. The publisher leans on trade rather than technology, stating that Sommelia is built by a restaurant professional and sommelier, not by a tech company, and traces the idea back to fully booked summer evenings when guests wanted the perfect wine and nobody had the time. The service went live in 2026.
What it does
- Recommend a wine pairing taken from the restaurant's own list, not from a generic catalogue
- Read a wine list uploaded as an Excel or PDF file and structure it automatically
- Open a chat on the diner's phone from a QR code placed on the table
- Connect the food menu so the sommelier knows the dishes the kitchen actually serves
- Answer in the guest's language, adapting to whoever is at the table
- Switch to a cuisine-specific sommelier persona, Valentín, Vincent, Gavi or Freyja, on the Premium plan
- Promote selected bottles so the sommelier recommends them more often, and export the list as a presentation PDF
When to use Sommelia / When not to
A quick filter to help you decide if Sommelia is the right fit.
When to use Sommelia
- Restaurants whose wine list raises more guest questions than the floor staff has time to answer.
- Busy venues working full houses, where a table waits while the server is somewhere else.
- Kitchens with a strong culinary identity, Spanish, French, Italian or Nordic, that can be matched to one of the four specialised Premium sommeliers.
- Restaurant chains and hotel groups, offered group accounts with central administration, consolidated billing and volume pricing.
- Venues with no salaried sommelier on the floor, and those whose list changes often: a new file can be uploaded at any time and is learned straight away.
When not to use Sommelia
- Operators outside Sweden and Denmark: only SEK and DKK are configured, and company-ID validation accepts nothing but a 10-digit Swedish org.nr or an 8-digit Danish CVR.
- Teams that want a native app: the guest side runs on a mobile browser and a scanned QR code, and no iOS or Android application exists.
- Anyone expecting to plug the service into a till, a booking system or an in-house stack: there is no public API, no developer documentation and no third-party connector.
- Buyers who need to know exactly which legal entity they are contracting with: the publisher states no company name, no address and no company number anywhere.
- High-volume venues and anyone counting on a permanent free tier: a subscription is required after 14 days, and guest conversations are capped at 1,500 a month on Genuine and 3,000 on Premium, beyond which a custom arrangement has to be negotiated.
How to use Sommelia
A typical end-to-end flow, from setup to results.
- Create an account at app.sommelia.se/signup with the restaurant name, a slug (a-z, 0-9 and hyphens), an email address and a password of at least 12 characters
- Pick your sommelier at the next signup step
- Upload the wine list as an Excel or PDF file and let the service structure and learn it
- Connect the food menu so recommendations match the dishes you actually serve
- Print the QR code table card and place it on the table, or fold it into the paper menu
- Let guests scan, type what they are eating and receive a wine with its region, vintage and tasting note
- Use the 14-day full-access trial, which needs no payment card and can be cancelled at any time, to test the whole thing in service
- Supply the company ID when you move to payment: a 10-digit Swedish org.nr or an 8-digit Danish CVR, optional at signup but required for the invoice
- Run the venue from the admin panel: monthly conversation quota, promoted wines, JSON export, Stripe customer portal, account deletion
- Move up or down between plans at any time as the season and the volume change
Pros & Cons
Pros
- Recommendations are constrained to the venue's real list, so a guest is never pointed at a bottle the cellar does not stock
- Nothing to install on the guest side: a mobile browser and one scan, no application, no account
- Legal documentation unusually complete for a product this size: separate privacy policy, terms and an article 28 DPA, published in Swedish, Danish and English
- Subprocessors named with their country and role, with at least 30 days' notice before any change and a right to terminate free of charge
- Application and database hosted in the EU at Hetzner in Germany, with a single named and framed transfer outside it
- Retention that is bounded and published: guest conversations deleted automatically after 90 days, with self-service JSON export and account deletion that do not go through support
- 14-day trial with no payment card, no commitment period, plan changes at any time, and public prices in local currency on both markets
Cons
- The publisher never names itself: the terms say only that Sommelia is operated by the business behind app.sommelia.se, with no legal notice page, no postal address and no company number
- No company called Sommelia could be found in the Swedish register, although the application's own translation notice says the contract is with the Swedish company
- Very young product: domain registered on 07/04/2026, legal documents dated April 2026, and not a single Wayback Machine capture of the site
- No customer reference, no testimonial and no usage figure is published, so there is nothing to check the promise against
- No public API, no developer documentation and no connector to a till system or a booking platform
- The Premium price contradicts itself between sources: 1,499 SEK per month on the marketing pricing page against 1,249 SEK per month in the application's own price grid
- Narrow reach and hard limits: Sweden and Denmark only, 1,500 or 3,000 guest conversations a month, and no minimum age stated for a service that recommends alcohol
Pricing & Plans
There is no permanent free plan. Access runs on a subscription, opened by a 14-day free trial that gives full access, requires no payment card and can be cancelled at any time; after it, the terms state that an active subscription is required to keep using the guest chat. The entry point is the Genuine plan at 799 SEK per month billed monthly, or 699 SEK per month billed annually, on the Swedish market, and 549 DKK per month monthly or 479 DKK per month annually on the Danish market. Premium is listed at 1,499 SEK per month monthly and 1,249 SEK per month annually on the marketing pricing page, while the application's own price grid carries 1,249 SEK and 1,049 SEK for the same plan, a discrepancy the reader should be aware of; the Danish Premium prices are 1,049 DKK and 879 DKK per month. The Genuine entry price is consistent at 799 SEK per month across both sources. Above the conversation quotas, or for several venues, pricing is by quotation. Payment is handled by Stripe and renews automatically until cancelled through the customer portal; there is no commitment period, but no pro-rata refund is offered when a subscription is cancelled mid-period. None of the amounts carries a VAT indication: the site states neither excluding nor including tax.
- 799 SEK per month billed monthly or 699 SEK per month billed annually in Sweden
- 549 DKK or 479 DKK per month in Denmark. Presented as everything a restaurant needs to start with an AI sommelier
- it includes the Sommelia sommelier
- Excel and PDF wine-list upload
- menu integration
- the QR code
- the mobile view of the list
- PDF export
- 1
- 499 SEK per month billed monthly or 1
- 249 SEK per month billed annually in Sweden according to the marketing pricing page
- while the application's price grid shows 1
- 249 SEK and 1
- 049 SEK
- 1
- 049 DKK or 879 DKK per month in Denmark. It adds to Genuine the choice of a specialised sommelier among Valentín
- price on request
- aimed at restaurant chains and hotel groups
- with central administration
- consolidated billing
- volume pricing and contact by email.
- 14 days of full access on either public plan
- no payment card
- cancellable at any time
- there is no permanent free plan behind it.
Data, GDPR & hosting
A consolidated view of how Sommelia handles your data.
GDPR overview
GDPR handling is documented rather than merely claimed. An article 28 data processing agreement takes effect automatically once the account is created and the terms accepted. Access, rectification and erasure are set out, with objection and portability mentioned on the marketing site; the single channel is hello@sommelia.se, alongside admin-panel self-service. One named transfer leaves the EU, to Anthropic PBC in the United States, under article 46 standard contractual clauses. Breaches are notified without undue delay and within 72 hours to the account's admin address, stating nature, data affected, likely consequences and measures taken. Any change of subprocessor carries at least 30 days' notice and a right to terminate free of charge. Listed measures: TLS, bcrypt, encrypted backups, a separate audit log of privileged admin actions, need-to-know production access. No article 27 representative is designated, the publisher being EU-established. Only the Swedish version of the documents is binding.
Who owns the data?
The roles are split explicitly: the restaurant is the data controller and Sommelia is the data processor, acting only on the restaurant's documented instructions as expressed through the admin panel configuration. Wine lists and menus are uploaded by the restaurant itself. Guest conversations, the recommendations returned and technical metadata such as token counts and cost are attached to a random session identifier, and no personal data is collected proactively from diners. The customer can export everything as JSON from the admin panel and delete the account outright, without going through support, from the Subscription screen under Danger zone. Billing details sit with Stripe: only the Stripe customer identifier is stored, never card data.
Reuse rights
The stated purpose is delivering the service: receiving guest messages, generating a recommendation from the wine list and the menu, displaying it, and running the QR code, the admin panel and billing. The marketing-side policy adds providing and improving the service, managing the account and sending information about Sommelia. To produce an answer, the guest's message and the relevant parts of the list are sent to Anthropic's API; Anthropic processes in the United States under standard contractual clauses (GDPR article 46) and does not store the input for model training. Usage data drawn from the conversations is described as anonymised. Sentry and PostHog are activated only after consent through the cookie banner, PostHog does not store the IP address, and error reports are stripped of email addresses and phone numbers before they reach Sentry. As controller, the restaurant keeps free use of its own material and can pull all of it out as JSON at any time, without asking anyone.
Data retention & training
Hosting summary
The application and the database run inside the EU. The named host is Hetzner Online GmbH in Germany, providing the servers, the database and the backup storage; backups are daily, encrypted, and kept in Hetzner Object Storage within the EU. The only transfer outside the EU in normal operation goes to Anthropic PBC in the United States, which generates the recommendations, and it is covered by article 46 standard contractual clauses. The other named subprocessors stay inside the Union: Sentry and PostHog are run in their EU regions, and payments go through Stripe Payments Europe, Ltd. in Ireland. All traffic is encrypted with TLS and passwords are stored with bcrypt. Access to production data is restricted to the service's own developers on a need-to-know basis, and privileged administrative actions are written to a separate audit log.
Where Sommelia works
Country-level availability.
Available in
Things to keep in mind
Risks and trade-offs to weigh before adopting Sommelia.
- No legal identity is published anywhere. The terms say only that Sommelia is operated by the business behind app.sommelia.se: no legal notice page, no postal address, no company number, which is why the company name, its founding date and its beneficial owner are all recorded as not found. The application's own translation notice states that the contract is with the Swedish company, yet no company called Sommelia was found in the Swedish register. If something goes wrong, it is unclear who you would be writing to.
- The Premium price disagrees with itself: 1,499 SEK per month on the marketing pricing page against 1,249 SEK per month in the application's price grid. The Genuine entry price matches at 799 SEK in both sources. None of the amounts says whether VAT is included, so the real cost of a Premium subscription is not knowable from the site alone.
- No minimum age is stated anywhere, on a service whose entire purpose is recommending alcoholic drinks. Nothing in the guest journey stands between a minor scanning the code at the table and being advised on wine.
- The recommendation is advisory and should be treated as such. The publisher writes that AI recommendations do not replace professional advice regarding allergens or similar, so a floor team leaning on the chat for dietary or allergen questions is leaning on the wrong thing. A confident, well-written pairing can also read as expertise to a guest: the persona is a product, not a certified sommelier standing at the table.
- The no-training commitment covers the subprocessor, not the publisher. The policy says Anthropic does not store the input for model training, but Sommelia makes no equivalent statement about its own use of the data, and no opt-out mechanism is documented, neither offered nor declared unavailable. The robots.txt blocking of GPTBot, ClaudeBot, CCBot and Google-Extended, with a Content-Signal ai-train=no directive, protects the site's own content, not customer data.
- The conversation snippets on the homepage are demonstration mock-ups, not measured performance, and the percentages shown alongside them are part of the mock-up. No customer reference, testimonial or usage figure is published, and the product is too new to have any operating track record: the domain was registered in April 2026 and the site has never been captured by the Wayback Machine.
- Housekeeping signals are weak. The sitemap declares /privacy-policy and /terms, neither of which matches a real route, the live ones being /integritetspolicy and /villkor, and the whole site renders in JavaScript with nothing readable without script execution. Availability in Sweden and Denmark is inferred from the market configuration in the application code, not from a stated availability policy. A sixth sommelier persona, Gunther for German cuisine, and a Coming soon label sit in the translation table without ever appearing in the interface.
Setup & Integrations
Technical difficulty
Low. Nothing is installed on the guest side: a phone browser and a scanned QR code are enough. On the restaurant side the work is creating an account, uploading an Excel or PDF wine list, which the service structures on its own, and printing a table card. There is no technical integration to build, no API, no connector and no till system to wire up. The only administrative step is supplying the company ID at payment. The 14-day trial runs without a payment card, so the whole set-up can be tested in service before committing.
Deployment
Supported languages
Behind Sommelia
Resources
All the official URLs gathered for verification and reference.
Frequently asked questions
What counts as a guest conversation, and what happens if we need more?
Can we change plan later?
How does the free trial work?
Does the guest need to install an app?
Which languages does the sommelier answer in?
In which formats can we upload the wine list?
Where is the data hosted?
How long are guest conversations kept?
Is there a data processing agreement?
Is there an API or an integration with our till system?
Should you pick Sommelia?
Sommelia does one thing and aims it at one trade. A restaurant uploads its wine list, prints a table card, and the guest who scans it gets a pairing drawn from the bottles actually in the cellar. There is no second product and no attempt at a platform, and that focus is the main reason to look at it.
Two things stand out for a buyer. The first is the paperwork, well above what products of this size usually publish: a separate privacy policy, terms and an article 28 DPA in three languages, subprocessors named with their country and role, 30 days' notice before any change, EU hosting at Hetzner with a single named transfer to Anthropic in the United States under standard contractual clauses, and guest conversations deleted after 90 days. The second is the opposite of reassuring: the publisher never names itself. No company name, no address, no company number, and no company called Sommelia turns up in the Swedish register, even though the terms say the contract is with the Swedish company.
The product is also new. The domain was registered in April 2026, the legal documents date from the same month, the site has never been archived, and no customer reference or usage figure is published. The conversation snippets on the homepage are demonstration mock-ups, not measured results.
Entry pricing is legible: 799 SEK per month for Genuine, a 14-day trial with no card, no commitment. Premium is less legible, at 1,499 SEK on the marketing page against 1,249 SEK in the application's own grid.
Worth a trial if you run a Swedish or Danish restaurant with a list your staff cannot always talk through. Ask who you are contracting with, and which Premium price applies, before you subscribe.
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