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."

Comments

Don't know

[Cackmobile]

This starts wine down the mass production route where they all taste the same. The grape variety is what gives wine is distinctiveness. If you had a whole vienyard the same you couldn't have nice blends. What about for sweet wines where they have the fungus growing, botrytus (i think thats how its spelt), they would go all wrong.

Re:Don't know

[squaretorus]

INSIGHTFUL!!!!!

The biggest driver of mass produced wine is exactly the opposite of whats happening here. Grow bad / inconsistent grapes due to bad watering / pruning and you get unreliable wine.

What happens to unreliable wine? It gets blended with all the other unreliable wine from the region and sold as 'Californian Red' or 'Chilean Merlot'.

This is aiming to produce a saleable quantity of consistently good wine - not mass production. This is ambitious wine making - in that he aims to produce GOOD wine - not just wine.

I assume you dont drink a lot of the stuff!

Re:Don't know

[inoffensif]

I have to agree and I am a little suspicious about the long term effects this will have on the wine industry, although the trend has been in this direction for the last few years. The homogenization of wine crops over an area and over time goes against everything that makes wine appreciation worthwile.

You could draw an analogy between wine and theater.

The theater differs from the movies in the way that the audience knows that they are assisting a unique event where there are subtle differences in the play and in the interaction with the audience each and every night, and where once in a while something totally stands out in the performance and makes it truly unique. Whereas at the movies, however good the movie may be, you can be assured that what you are seeing will be exactly the same as what everybody else will see, and if you see it again it will again be the same.

The same can be said about winemaking, some years a vineyard will produce a crop that has had more exposure to the sun, more rain, etc... Even the fruits and nuts which grow next to the grapes any given year will greatly affect its taste, this is what makes wine appreciation and comparison a delightful experience. The homogenized and controlled approach ressembles cinema in the way that it aims to deliver the same experience over and over again with the least variation.

Re:Don't know

[the clean]

I think you are somewhat mistaken. While it is true the grape variety adds to the distinctiveness of a wine, it is the specific blend of different varieties of grapes that lead to these wine varities. I am not aware of any comercial wines (although I see no reason why there shouldn't be any) that are solely comprised of one variety of grape. Infact, in most countries the exact blends and precentages are strictly regulated by the national governments. Again, while it is true the different grapes add distinctive quailites to the wines, if a vineyard wants to produce a run of brollos, say, they want to make sure the entire run is of the same quality, otherwise the reputation of the wine and the vineyard will be at stake. Consequently, they would want some guarantee that every grape of a certain variety which is to make up the wine is exactly the same. Hence, each crop can be massed produced to be identical (please, no grape clones!), and yet keep the distinctive wines as different blends are produced.

Probably redundant

[Cackmobile]

I forgot to mention that this would eliminate yearly changes. Every year would be the same. you wouldn't get the great vintages. Also how would you know that you have the best vintage possible if its always the same.

Re:Probably redundant

[Jellybob]

Just because things can be monitored, it doesn't stop you changing things.

Anything can be abused in some way - it's the decision of the producer whether or not they still make changes to their procedures to produce different types of wine. The monitoring just assists them to make sure that the changes can be reproduced if it *does* turn out to make an excellent wine.

Re:Probably redundant

[RealErmine]

Every year would be the same. you wouldn't get the great vintages. Also how would you know that you have the best vintage possible if its always the same.

Couldn't a vineyard owner set up microclimate zones within his crops to produce a wide range of specific flavored grapes? Then it would only be a matter of picking specific flavors from the crop either for a homogenous wine made of grapes from a single zone, or a blended wine which incorporates the flavor of multiple Flavor Zones(TM). The experimentation could lead to a better wine for each vintage instead of a semi-random distribution of great vintages.

I can also see how this would allow smaller vineyard owners the opportunity to produce more than one or two types of wine since the management of microclimates would ensure better crop yields in smaller areas.

It's up to the vineyard owner how (s)he wants to experiment with the microclimates in order to produce grapes/wine. The imaginitive ones will probably make good use of the technology to make excellent wines of all types.

is it me or is that kind of weird?

[lingqi]

I don't know - when I read this, I got the same feeling of "bleh" I get when I think about genetic engineered corn and machine-pressed hamburger patties.

I mean, I know this will eventually comes out to be better wine (I hope), but I somehow feel creeped out by it.

Maybe this signals an oncoming age of specialty "wine made the same way as it always has been for the past 3000 years" niche.

Why does human mind do that, anyways - such illogical creatures, no?