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

oh YES!!

[purduephotog]

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.....

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

[HowlinMad]

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.

Re:Don't know

[The Fun Guy]

Actually, this day is a lot closer than you might think. Do a Google on "wine reverse osmosis", and you'll see what I mean. Reverese osmosis allows the vintner to selectively remove water and sugar so as to adjust the brix, acidity, and concentration of volatiles, tannins, etc. Nobody produces crappy years anymore, because even good vintages are run through a reverse osmosis machine to make them better and more consistent... more "mass produced". Every year is a good year, although some are still outstanding.

The grape varieties are being modified with modern agronomic breeding tools, including genetic modifications, to make them better able to produce decent juice from poorer soils/sites. As with beer, the yeast strains used in wine making are being controlled with sophisticated molecular biology tools to get the mixes of micromolar end products of fermentation that make for an interesting wine. Precision agriculture has been used in high-value crops like wine grapes for many years, it's just that now it's starting to be wirelessly networked and automated.

Only small-volume boutique wines are made by Francois/Guisseppe relying solely on the wisdom his father handed down to him from his father before him.

Re:Don't know

[zakath]

This 'all tastes the same' has already been identified as a problem by many wine purists. The Bordeaux flavour paradigm being copied by everyone from Oz to Chile to the US and on and on has brought on a homogenous affect to wine making. Not to mention the 'Parker effect' whereby taster/critic Robert Parker scores a wine well by his (impressive) palate and the wine immediately goes through the roof in terms of price. This has made wine makers all over the world scurrying to produce wines they hope will appeal to his taste thus enabling them to command great prices. Wine is already being mass produced everywhere - its not the quantity of grape that is so much the problem you appear to be referring to but the wine maker and the flavour he's targetting that are more of a problem for those who crave variety and maybe mor of the 'way things used to be'.

Don King..

[Blaster Jaack]

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

Wireless wine

[oniony]

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.

other-kind-of-wine dept.??

[Lu Xun]

And here I thought it was something to keep those pesky Windows APIs from getting all uppity.

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:Ice wine art ?

[lovebyte]

In fact it is illegal for many regions of France to water vineyards.

Frost Patterns Thwarted By AMD

[Root Down]

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!

Re:Price vs Quality

[schlach]

This is hilarious. A first for Slashdot: the high-brow flame war.

Let those suits tell us we're a bunch of unsophisticated cretins now. =p