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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
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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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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.