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Wireless Wine Monitoring
Wynken de Word writes "An article in Canada's Globe and Mail says 'vineyard owner Don King is coaxing 30,000 plants to grow grapes of exactly the right colour, size and sweetness to produce great ice wine and other fine vintages...with the help of judicious watering, a knowledge of the age-old art of viniculture -- and electronic sensing devices linked together in a wireless network.' Using an Intel-based TinyOS and TinyDB, multiple sensing devices monitor grape micro climates and help determine irrigation and frost patterns."
In fact it is illegal for many regions of France to water vineyards.
I'll do it for cheesy poofs.
Actually, this day is a lot closer than you might think. Do a Google on "wine reverse osmosis", and you'll see what I mean. Reverese osmosis allows the vintner to selectively remove water and sugar so as to adjust the brix, acidity, and concentration of volatiles, tannins, etc. Nobody produces crappy years anymore, because even good vintages are run through a reverse osmosis machine to make them better and more consistent... more "mass produced". Every year is a good year, although some are still outstanding.
The grape varieties are being modified with modern agronomic breeding tools, including genetic modifications, to make them better able to produce decent juice from poorer soils/sites. As with beer, the yeast strains used in wine making are being controlled with sophisticated molecular biology tools to get the mixes of micromolar end products of fermentation that make for an interesting wine. Precision agriculture has been used in high-value crops like wine grapes for many years, it's just that now it's starting to be wirelessly networked and automated.
Only small-volume boutique wines are made by Francois/Guisseppe relying solely on the wisdom his father handed down to him from his father before him.
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them. - Mark Twain
This 'all tastes the same' has already been identified as a problem by many wine purists. The Bordeaux flavour paradigm being copied by everyone from Oz to Chile to the US and on and on has brought on a homogenous affect to wine making. Not to mention the 'Parker effect' whereby taster/critic Robert Parker scores a wine well by his (impressive) palate and the wine immediately goes through the roof in terms of price. This has made wine makers all over the world scurrying to produce wines they hope will appeal to his taste thus enabling them to command great prices. Wine is already being mass produced everywhere - its not the quantity of grape that is so much the problem you appear to be referring to but the wine maker and the flavour he's targetting that are more of a problem for those who crave variety and maybe mor of the 'way things used to be'.
age-old art of viniculture
That's viticulture...