Rethinking Wine Tasting for Chinese Consumers: A Service Design Approach Enhanced by Multimodal Personalization

Wine tasting is a multimodal and culturally embedded activity that presents unique challenges when adapted to non-Western contexts. This paper proposes a service design approach rooted in contextual co-creation to reimagine wine tasting experiences for Chinese consumers. Drawing on 26 in-situ interviews and follow-up validation sessions, we identify three distinct user archetypes: Curious Tasters, Experience Seekers, and Knowledge Builders, each exhibiting different needs in vocabulary, interaction, and emotional pacing. Our findings reveal that traditional wine descriptors lack cultural resonance and that cross-modal metaphors grounded in local gastronomy (e.g., green mango for acidity) significantly improve cognitive and emotional engagement. These insights informed a partially implemented prototype, featuring AI-driven metaphor-to-flavour mappings and real-time affective feedback visualisation. A small-scale usability evaluation confirmed improvements in engagement and comprehension. Our comparative analysis shows alignment with and differentiation from prior multimodal and affect-aware tasting systems. This research contributes to CBMI by demonstrating how culturally adaptive interaction systems can enhance embodied consumption experiences in physical tourism and beyond.