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!

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

[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.