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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.....
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.
-- Karma Karma Karma Karma, Karma Chameleon - Boy George
owner Don King is coaxing 30,000 plants to grow grapes of exactly the right colour, size and sweetness
because of legal issues they had to replace the word boxers with plants
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.
Powered by onion juice.
And here I thought it was something to keep those pesky Windows APIs from getting all uppity.
That's not a soda... it's a caffeine delivery device!
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.
-- Karma Karma Karma Karma, Karma Chameleon - Boy George
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
"Gather around ladies and gentleman for the most outrageous, the most stupendous, the most fabulous, the most amazing wine you have ever tasted! This wine will knock your hat off, knock your socks off, knock your block off! I say I say again, the match of the millenium, they will call this wine "the tasteah oh the greatah", "the wineah oh the fineah"!
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 ?
Using an Intel-based TinyOS and TinyDB, multiple sensing devices monitor grape micro climates and help determine irrigation and frost patterns.
Now, if they had only used AMD chips, the increased heat alone would have obviated the need to check for frost patterns!
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?
My life in the land of the rising sun.
There are plenty of other variables that are essentially at the discretion of the vintner (I believe that's the correct word?), all of whom have different tastes/beliefs.
Plus there's quite a bit of influence on the wine's taste in the genetics of the grapes themselves. Many wines are named based on the variety of grape that they use, and there are MANY.
Even with precise control over the variables the vintner can control, there are simply too many other variables he/she cannot.
Overall, I think this is good quality control, since IIRC moisture levels and sun tend to contribute the most to seasonal variations in wine. Sun is not very controllable (unless the vintner adds lighting/shades), moisture is. It's a good way to avoid "bad years", which I consider a good thing. (As almost all of my favorite wines had a "bad year" due to rain patterns last year. Wagner Vineyards in Lodi, NY usually produces an excellent Niagara, this past year it was horrendous, as were most of my other favorites from the area.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
There are too many other factors.
It will probably reduce a lot of the variation, but there will still be quite a bit.
Good news is that the thing this is most likely to eliminate are the "really bad" years, like last year in upstate NY - Almost every wine from that region last year sucked due to rain patterns, even my personal favorites which were pretty consistent with mild variation from year to year in the past.
Mild variations OK - Total suck, BAD.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
I'm sure that the vintner will also trust his own instincts and use the new datacollection system as an auxiliary tool and not rely on it 100%.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
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.
Start up your Computer controlled barbecue slow cooker and have a party! Yeeha!
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
It's hard to beat a 5$ bottle from Australia that tastes as good as a 15$ bottle from Sonoma. Which is entirely my point- there are several good wines that are inexpensive, although there are considerably more that are bad.
;-)
Don't be such a California snobb
Seriously tho, every area has (zone 1/2) some outstanding wines, but I tend to like more pepper than tannin, and I've found that (for the price!) I get a better deal buying down under than across the plains.
I already commented in this column about this. But it was based on this Wired News article, Making Wines Finer With Wireless.
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 vintners know in excruciating detail the exact temperatures and numbers of days in a certain weather that led to one vintage or another - and you'll hear wine buffs recite these and swoon over the details of a specific year and things like which hill certain grapes came from... and they can opt to time things the best - right down to things like opting for night harvest, etc... this gives them a finer mesh on their data, both in space and time. I can just about listen to all the details without just leaping up and well open the bloody bottle and just drink it already! *ahem* but when it works, it's wonderful. this should help - i presume they won't be going for an average here, but going for optimum. i'm trying hard not to imagine days on a hillside in the finger lakes with my iBook checking on the grapes under a big tree, sampling the last batch, and fragging other thinktanks... starbucks eat your heart out.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
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.
When I first skimmed the blurb I seriously thought "Well if he's coaxing the vines that's not very wireless, is it" and had odd thoughts of RG-6 throughout a vineyard. Glad to hear he's not co-ax-ing.
i might've been born yesterday, but i stayed up all night
I could use this to monitor how my plants are doing in jamaica, nice red hairs.
It's the grapetrix.
'Icewine' or 'Eiswine' is a German thing, using Reisling grapes left on the vine past their prime (spatlesen or late picked) and through the first frost, then picked frozen. The ice is pressed from the frozen grapes, leaving behind a very high-solids, high-sugar must.
Executive summary: this stuff is going to be super super sweet . Consistency (and sugar content) of maple syrup. Not to be served with meat or fish. Most likely served in a small apertif glass after a meal.
Personally, I hate wines of this type - I'd much rather open a good Zin or Shiraz - but hey, to each his own.
Everyone will start to cheer when you put on your sailin' shoes.
While growing grapes is nice there are others that might also find this technology useful.
age-old art of viniculture
That's viticulture...
There are a number of great producers in western australia that are starting to get some notice (Howard Park is really good). Ask your wine guy to introduce you to some the next time you go shopping.
But, as the original poster mentions in a follow-up, it's hard to beat a $5 bottle that tastes like it should cost $35.
There are 01 types of people in this world. Those that understand binary, and me.
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.
I'd like to share a revelation that I've had, during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species I realized that you're not actually plants. Every plant on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment, but you grapes do not. You move to an area, and you multiply, and multiply, until every fencepost is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another fence. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. A virus. Grapes are a disease, a cancer of this planet, you are a plague, and the French are the cure.
Someone named an OS for me.
The cool thing about this is that the grower can tweak the grapes to yield a high quality product. And if others do it too, so what? The worst that can happen is that all the trolls who horde obscure Bordeaux wines for the prestige suddenly find their stock worth about a quarter of what it once was. Wine is meant for drinking anyway.
I'm privileged in that I get to sample a whole lot of the finer things in life for free or reduced cost as part of my job, but I'd be happy if people were able to get a really nice cab for $5 just as I would if they could be sampling Cohiba Robustos and Partagas Lusitanias from Cuba for the same price. Quality makes a huge difference, and more quality to more people is fine with me.