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Claire Adamson meets a wine-loving doge who is much sommelier, so critique. Wow. Nope, we don't know what it means either.

Robert Parker may be the most influential wine critic in the world, and Jancis Robinson perhaps the most highly respected. But the distinction of being the cutest wine critic surely goes to Suki, the canine connoisseur who runs the blog Shiba Sommelier.

Suki is a two-year-old Shiba Inu who resides in New York with her human assistants James and Kyoko Crawford. She is New York’s pre-eminent wine tasting doge, and to date has offered up tasting notes and ratings for wines that range from obscure Hungarian reds to bottles of 1982 Château Haut-Brion.

Suki is a self-proclaimed diva, and her favorite part of being a sommelier is hamming it up for the camera. According to Kyoko, Suki likes to pair her wines with cheese. Or just pair any particular moment in her life with cheese. She is a dog after my own heart.

Shiba Sommelier was started as a fun side project for James and Kyoko, whose love of wine has taken them around the world. The blog was a way that the couple could bring together their two key passions: wine and photographing Suki as she went about her daily life. The scores – out of five ‘bones’ – are based on the wine’s value for money as much as its intrinsic quality.

James and Kyoko help Suki run the blog and associated Twitter feed (as a dog without language skills or opposable thumbs, this is difficult for Suki to manage on her own).

While Shibes are so-hot-right-now, James and Kyoko insist that they were doing it before it was cool. Kyoko’s Japanese heritage meant that she grew up with a Shiba Inu (albeit in California) and living in New York meant that a compact dog was an obvious choice. Doges have since become an important part of the internet landscape, and Suki’s fanbase is made up of wine-lovers and Shibe-lovers in equal measures. She even takes tips in the Dogecoin crypto-currency.

Suki is currently in the process of making a name for herself among shibes and wine critics alike, and was recently on hand to ‘bless’ the office of web community blog the Daily Dot. Despite her obvious cuteness, she isn’t quite cool enough yet to have attracted the attention of Menswear Dog, another niche New York-based lifestyle shibe. James has tried to set them up on a doggy-park date to no avail, despite his promise that Suki will bring along some fantastic wines.