Steal This Play · Oct 5, 2026
Turn Your Review Pile Into a Weekly 30-Minute Job With Claude
Unanswered reviews cost you bookings you never see, and the complaints buried in them are free product and operations feedback. A Claude Project can draft every reply in your voice and surface the repeat problems in about 30 minutes a week.
Most tasting rooms, taprooms, and bottle shops answer the five-star reviews and quietly skip the one-star ones. That is backwards. The angry review is the one prospects read all the way through, and your reply is the only part of it you control.
Doing this by hand eats an hour or two a week and it never gets scheduled, so it never happens. Here is how to make it a 30-minute Friday job.
What to prepare
- Copy your last 30 to 60 days of reviews into one document. Google Business Profile and Yelp both let you read them on screen: paste the star rating, the date, the reviewer's first name, and the full text into a Word doc or Google Doc. One review per block.
- Write a one-page brand voice sheet. How you talk (warm, dry, plainspoken), words you never use, your owner's or GM's name and title, how you handle a refund or comp, and the two or three things you will not apologize for (your tasting fee, your dog policy, your no-bachelorette-party rule).
- Grab your current tasting fees, hours, reservation policy, and shipping policy. Facts stop the AI from inventing them.
Set it up once in Claude
Go to claude.ai and create a Project. Projects hold standing context, so every chat inside it already knows your brand. Upload the voice sheet and the policy facts. Name it something like "Review Replies." Claude Pro is about $20 a month ($17 billed yearly), and Projects work inside it. Check Anthropic's pricing page before you buy.
Then start a new chat in that Project, upload the review document, and paste the prompt below.
Then what
Read every draft before it posts. Fix anything that promises a comp you did not authorize. Copy the replies into Google and Yelp yourself.
The second half of the output is the part that pays. If four people mention a 20-minute wait at the bar on Saturdays, that is a staffing decision, not a review problem. Run it every Friday and keep the pattern reports in the same Project so Claude can compare month to month.
Good output looks like: replies short enough to read on a phone, no two starting with the same word, and a pattern list with counts and named fixes, not "improve customer service."