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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."
As an avid wine consumer (not the french word;P) you can have no idea how happy this makes me. My cellar is currently stocked with ~130 bottles, mostly from SE Australia (Cabs) and quite a few from upstate NY where I live. Managing the microclimate to produce consistent wines is far more important than trying to hit a home run. I shy away from buying multiple cases of wine until I sample several different bottles of the same year, just on the chance that I got lucky.
Now if I only owned a larger back yard.....
I can't say I've ever known a wine with wires.
Seriously though, as more product based (manufacturing and farming) companies turn to wireless technology the potential for disaster grows. Someone spoofing these plants' state could seriously write-off the crop. I'm counting the days until I see the first wireless industrial sabotage.
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produce great ice wine and other fine vintages...with the help of judicious watering, a knowledge of the age-old art of viniculture
...)
We in France never mix great, fine wintage and age-old art with ice wine and watering in our phrases.
(Then again, since all our phrases are in french, I suppose it explains
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
While I understand your concern, I do not think this will be such a problem. There are plenty of other factors, such as soil composition (nutrients et al.), pollution, and even the amount of sunshine it gets. There may be more, or less sunny days. I think this will help in getting more quality grapes out of a crop than it will for making a grape that tastes exactly the same year to year.
Of course, I just might be full of it.
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before moding me down, read...
remember keanu reeve's johnny mnemonic ? a cyberpunk data courrier carrying the cure for a brain disease caused by excessive exposure to information ?
science fiction appart, we're more and more exposed to wireless communications and other forms of electro-magnetic interference since the radio was invented and no one knows exactly what kind of consequences this exposure has over humans (if some one knows, tell me. all I heard until now is noise. ppl from the industry says one thing, environmentalist another...).
what if all this electro-magnetic noise around us proves to be harmfull ? remember that early in the 20th century doctors used to prescribe cigaretes to relieve stress, and it took a century or more before everyone, including the tobacco industry, to agree smoking was not exactly healthy. how many time it'll take before we're sure about radio signals all over us ?
What ? Me, worry ?
Getting large numbers of sensors in the field in the field is only part of the battle. Once this is done you must
1) Make sure that you're not swapping sensors around. Reading temperature sensors in the shade versus one in the sun will back a huge difference.
2) Calibrate the sensors so the readings are sensible. 0.1 degreees may not sound like much, until you're at the edge of frost formation.
3) Reliably deliver that data to a server.
4) Detect failing sensors.
5) Grant visisibility of the data to only those people who should see it.
6) Raise alerts if things get far out of range. This will often require a model of how things should behave...
and most imporantly
7) Let the users access the gathered data in many ways. For example, the raw temperature may be important--but rate of change even more so. You'll also want to be able to compare different fields, and this year's data against last year's. Graphed versus downloadable, etc.
We've been working on remote sensing for a while, check out www.telegnomic.com.
Wine growers somehow have the money and the desire to use the latest technology...hmmm...could it be because they are often rich ex-technologists who have retired and gone into a field where the right attitude and social networking can lead other rich people to pay $100+ for grape juice that's gone bad?
Sorry, it's my birthday, and I'm cynical. Fact is, the best wine I've ever had was 2001's St. Ives from Bully Hill. It's $6/bottle but tastes EXACTLY like what I want wine to taste like. Last year's batch tastes completely different and has lost all the really good, excuse the bullshit term, undertones, of the old wine of which I still have a dusty bottle in my basement. Sure, I'd like to have this years' batch taste the same as it did in 2001, and an expensive digital setup would help that. But Bully Hill is a very laid back organic winery. The reason St Ives was so perfect two years ago was that the weather was perfect, and nobody fucked with it. If they had, it would have lost its wild flavor, and I would have never gotten a taste of it.
Too much control is going to turn wine into Buddweiser. It's never skunky, it's never watery or too strong, but it's also never _GOOD_. Goodness is randomness in my book, but I'm a Wolfram-ite.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
The chief advantage of this sort of thing, as far as I can tell (IANAWM), is that it allows the wine maker to practice their craft with more consistent and better quality raw materials.
Like all good tools, it's how it is used that counts. Certainly it could allow greater homogenisation. On the other hand, it can allow the wine maker to create better and more interesting wines, when they do not have to cater to the vagaries of the environment to such a degree. If anything, I think such technology will have more of a positive effect than a negative, because the "consistently good but not great, dull but predictable and affordable" market seems to be sewn up already by the large wine manufacturers.
The biggest problem that wine has these days is that everyone and their brother has suddenly bought land and started growing grapes. So, the price of wine quality grapes has completely dropped through the floor.
In turn, now there is glut of good wine on the market, and people are hard pressed (sorry for the pun) to make any profit when there are so many other wineries out there with the same products.
In the past, there were only relative few number of producers so the price would remain high enough to keep them going.
If you drive around the coast in California between LA and San Francisco, nearly every available hillside has been cut back and planted with thousands of grape vines. You can't go a few hundred yards in some places without crossing a vinyard.
In a few years, I think many of these will be left to go fallow because there's just no money in undercutting the market in the long term.