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Wine Tasting Via Computer
smooth wombat writes "What makes a good wine? Why do some wines have a smooth, almond-like bouquet while others have a sharper, more acidic bite to them? These questions and more have usually been answered by oenologists who can list the subtle nuances of a particular wine and tell you if it's good or not. However, vinters don't have the luxury of waiting until a wine is ready to be drunk to know if they have produced a good, drinkable product. Lorenz "Larry" Biegler, who teaches chemical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, in conjunction with industry scientists in Chile, is working on mathematical formulas to automate the fermentation process, adjusting ingredients and conditions to ensure robust flavors and higher yields from grape harvests. The researchers have been collaborating for more than two years and are studying only white wines, since reds are more complex and contain solids that make them difficult to analyze."
Victory Wine anyone? I don't see any wine enthusiasts buying into this.
...Stories dupe you!
more wine for everyone
Wine tasting, as I'm sure most experts will agree, is as much of an art as anything; I doubt that people will allow a computer to tell them if a wine is "good" or not, even if it's right most of the time.
OTOH, if the computer only tells people if the wine is drinkable, or ready to be tasted, that's a different story. As long as the computer doesn't try to encroach on the "art" side of wine tasting and stays firmly on the "science" side, I think that it could be quite a useful invention - although to a tiny demographic.
http://www.TheGamerNation.com/Forums
For the record, the word is vintner, not vinter.
In Soviet Russia, vinters are wery, wery cold.
Bet I'm not the only /.'er to read "Wine" as "WINE" in the title.
Chemical anlaysis of wine has been going on for some time for a variety of purposes.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
case $name in ;; ;;
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product="perfect"
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product="sucks"
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http://www.distillery-yeast.com/turbo_yeast_functi on.htm
Yea for turbo yeasts.
I'm still waiting for yeasts that convert both sucrose/glucose & xylose to be available to your average consumer.
Wine yeasts give 14%~18% alcohol content.
Distillers yeast gives up to 21%
xylose converting yeast can up the yield significantly
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
There went my dream job in the 'quality control' dept!
In Soviet Russia, vinters are wery, wery cold.
/w/ (as in very=>wery) they won't pronounce "w" as a "v".
/v/ and /w/ in your sentence, but they're transposed... if someone could pronounce both, they wouldn't reverse them. Only one way or the other. Thus:
;)
If someone can pronounce
Just one of those things... you have both
"In Sowiet Russia, winters are wery, wery cold."
-or-
"In Soviet Russia, vinters are very, very cold."
I kills the joke, I know, but that's my job as a pedantic prick
I am unamerican, and proud of it!
... a non-porn reason to lick my screen!
some wines have a smooth, almond-like bouquet
No they dont. Nor do they taste like chocolate, raspberries or broccoli.
Really wine has 5 basic flavorings: 1) rotten grape 2) alcohol 3) wooden barrel 4) cork 5) mold
Old news. I've been able to debug my WINE install for ages now.
And what's this talk about "grapes" and "yeast", are they new distros?
http://www.TheGamerNation.com/Forums
In Soviet Russia, Child poster pedantasizes YOU!
http://www.TheGamerNation.com/Forums
Only in the alcoholic beverage industry would spend millions on R&D and scientists to engineer the perfect champaigne bubble, or how to make the perfect beer tap. IT doesn't come as a surprise they would try to engineer the perfect wine. :)
Being under the influence of a goodly sum of wine as I type this, I can surely tell you no computer could possibly tell good wine from Mad Dog 20/20.
... (hic...)
Good wine ~ good art. I can't define it, but I know it when I drink it.
Oh, and God Bless Oregon.
w00t!
There's a lot of money in this. Not surprisingly, a former vintner decided to make this into a company. In the past they have accurately ranked wine involved in taste comparisons by experts. Unexpectedly, they use a one dimensional scale which works, suggesting the wine judges use a one dimensional scale too.
The exact formula is a mystery/trade secret. But it is no secret that Enologix tests many of the top wines at various points in production, and they AVERAGE a 5-6 point rating increase for the first year they are contracted by their clients.
I've been to their web site before when it was useful and worked...right now they appear to be hosed.
Just finished fermenting 15 gallons of Chardonnay in glass. I'm about to rack it again to clear it and start the 'experimentation' phase- precisely how much oak is needed to make this a good wine.
p hp3 that is rather interesting- but all in good time.
;)
The oak selection seems to be pretty dominated by Nevers, but I wish I could find out how to buy some. There's a paper out at
http://www.wynboer.co.za/recentarticles/0400wood.
Right now, for me personally (and I'm about to start 15 more gallons of Chardonnay and 5 gallons of Pinot Grigio) I'm going for a very light oak flavour for 5 gallons- destined for Champagne- and a heavier oak that'll sit in the bottles to be served at house dinners.
All in all- I'll take ANY computer modeling that can help me predict what my quality will be... I just doubt it'll work unless I start investing in alot more equipment
You're missing a lot of great flavors by not drinking alcohol. You only live once, you should enjoy it.
Without WINE and FreeBSD on the other hand you'll probably be happier, so no loss there.
Where's the fun in that?
H.
When VCR's are outlawed, only outlaws will have VCR's.
Chilean scientists create mathematical formulas to help people decide which music sucks or not.
This might work well for jug wines that no one really drinks for the taste in the first place, but even cheap table wine has subtle (or not-so-subtle) nuances that might be erased by this process.
Wine Is Not Ethanol... Oh comeon. Someone had to do it.
is Alcohol %
Pulsed Media Seedboxes
...when the first thought is "How else are you going to test wine?"
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
This has already happened in the hard liquor industry. They try to keep a low profile, but Frank-Lin Distillers makes over 1000 different brands of liquor sold on the West Coast. They use only about 100 different formulas, though. It's all about branding. They're located near the railroad yards in San Jose, where the tank cars of industrial alcohol arrive from the Midwest on their two private railroad spurs. They run tap water through an in-house deionizing and purification plant, mix it with the alcohol, add flavoring, and bottle.
Here's a nice article about the automated palletizing system at their plant, including the three-conveyor bridge over the railroad tracks. You'll recognize the brand names on the product.
Some quotes". ... During the same shift and on the same bottling line, high-end 750-mL recyclable glass bottles of Tequila may be followed by 1.5-L recyclable polyethylene terephthalate bottles of Caribbean Rum, without a glitch."
"With an impressive assortment of distilled liquor tanks and eight automated bottling lines, Frank-Lin's San Jose, CA, plant produces more than five million cases of liquor products a year.
Once wine is figured out, the vintners are going to face competition from industrial producers like that. The vintners will fight, make noises about tradition and appelation, but in the end, the industrial scale stuff will win out. Because, most of the time, it will be better.
I fear my reaction -- "Of course they could only analyze white wines." makes me a snob.
Not that I drink much wine anyway. That there is the crazy sauce.
COMPUTER! Whatever happened to Blueberry Muffin?
Wine Is Not an Emultar .. oh, wait a sec...
LCD (lowest common denominator) wine.
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
Sounds like the program that Clear Channel radio was using to detect hits. They would feed music in one side, and magically out the other it would tell the suits what was 'Popular' music
Mankind and alcohol have a relationship that goes back what, possibly six thousand years. You haven't lived until you have swallowed a bit of port that has waited fifty years for you to open it. Try getting drunk with someone you love, or has saved your life. Drink a wine made by someone who has devoted their life to making wine, perhaps because his/her father/mother had.
Science can't touch that. Alcohol is the secular sacrement. It is our covenant with the world. That's why churches stole the idea for their covenant with their spirit worlds.
> "The researchers have been collaborating for more than two years and are studying only white wines, since reds are more complex and contain solids that make them difficult to analyze."
Damn. Reds are the only ones worth drinking!
French wines have not yet surrendered. They are NP-problems and can not be solved in a reasonnable time-frame. RTFA, my mistake, they are talking about foreign beverages.
BTW, a wine is as good as the meal it goes with. Chili beans any one?
Million Dollar Screenshot
.. is leaving a bad taste in my mouth.
I love telling this story.
Customer was a winery, brought in their SQL Server sprocs which were taking 24 hours to run. The problem is: start each season with say 10,000 barrels of grape pulp/juice, say each holds 1,000 gallons of a type of grape. Siphon off 100 gallons from Barrel A, put it in Barrel B, assume it mixes perfectly. Now B has 1000 of B, 100 of A. Siphon off 100 gallons of the mixture into Barrel C. Now C has a lot of C, less of B, still less of A. Now maybe you take some of the mixture of C and put it back in A. And so on, so forth, for thousands of runs, through the season.
At the end of the day, you want to know how much of each type of grape is in each barrel. The problem is at each step you have to recompute all the percentages. If they'd been using triggers, and a parts explosion table, with some of the numbers, it would have been better, but they were just running through the whole table for each calculation.
I took a machine with 4GB of memory and just allocated a 10,000x10,000 array of doubles in C, read in the #s, and did it all in memory. It went down from 24 hours to 60 seconds!
Of course, if you needed a million barrels, you would have needed I calculated something like exabytes of ram.
Personally, my drink of choice is Crown and diet, but since I worked as a bartender for a wine bar for 2 years, I have a passing knowledge of wine. So here's my take. The statement "These questions and more have usually been answered by oenologists who can list the subtle nuances of a particular wine and tell you if it's good or not." is misleading. It doesn't matter what "oenologists" say about a wine. If you want to find a "good" wine, try out several different ones and decide which one YOU like. Then find the least expensive wine you can find that suits your taste. My 2 personal favorites are the 1999 Katheryn Kennedy Lateral, and (cant remember the year) J. Bookwalter Merlot. However, right now I'm drinking a 2003 Rosemont Estate Shiraz, because it is quite similar to those 2, but it is $9 at the local grocery. And lastly, the most important thing. After you learn enough to bullshit your way through a wine conversation (the last 2 sentances made me sound like I know what I'm talking about, huh?), you can talk about it and enjoy it while not appearing to be a drunk. Because wine FUCKS YOU UP :)
----
Squirrel
And mercenary vinters, it would appear.
when first tasted. The reason most people continue drinking alcohol until they finally develop/force a taste for the stuff is social/peer pressure, just because it is such an accepted and expected thing to do. It's very similar to a teenager almost choking on their first few cigarettes. This type of social conformity which seems to be found in most humans disgusts me. To advance ourselves beyond the blindly irrational and sometimes downright destructive rituals and customs of the past, we humans must be willing to think, judge and act idependently. Seeing people drinking alcohol, and even analysing the taste and applying subtle desriptions of something that tastes so horrible just reminds me of how widespread unthinking blind conformity is.
And here I thought it was all about emulator Wine and VIA the electronics manufacturer.
In case it hasn't already been mentioned...
If you have any sort of interest in unique local versus standardized global products the documentary film Monovino will be of interest.
The documentary film interviews both small and large wine vinters regarding the art and/or business of making wine. As a geek, the interviews with the individuals and families of independent producers who took personal pride in their product were of interest. (As a side note, the extras on the USA DVDs were great.)
The film actually made me curious enough to want to discuss the wine biz (looking for a slashdot for wine), but the only decent wine geek discussions I found were on the wine spectator's web site. Which is ironic since the wine spectator is a key player in the globalization of wine by providing a standard rating scale.
My question, what will happen to the Robert Parker's and the Wine Spectators and every other player in the global wine industry once a 100 point wine can be bought at WalMart for $2. On npr.org, there is an article covering a recent tasting where a wine, nicknamed 2 Buck Chuck, won the top prize. From the article:
When it comes to wine, some consumers still equate quality with price. But at the 28th Annual International Eastern Wine Competition, a $1.99 bottle of California Wine, the 2002 Charles Shaw Shiraz, beat out 2,300 wines to win a prestigious double gold medal. Hear NPR's Steve Inkseep.
I can't find the site right now because of the extraordinary morass of wine-tasting sites on the internet, gooing up google, but as I recall, some time ago a scientific double blind study was run on groups of volunteers and individuals, testing a variety of wines. No two individuals or groups came up with the same or even slightly similar descriptions of the wines, even when presented with multiple choice options. Bring back the good old days of the Romans, when wine held approximately the same social position as lager! :D
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
The film actually made me curious enough to want to discuss the wine biz (looking for a slashdot for wine), but the only decent wine geek discussions I found were on the wine spectator's [winespectator.com] web site.
Far and away the leading mainstream bulletin board is hosted by Robert Parker himself [and administered by Mark Squires]:
The anti-Parker site is a little obscure. Be forewarned that you will need to know a LOT about wine before you will understand what they're talking about. Also be forewarned that the site is dominated by unreconstructed marxists, who can be pretty nasty people when given the opportunity. I won't hot-link to it, because the folks there claim to enjoy their privacy: Two other sites you might enjoy are Brad Harrington's West Coast Wine Net, and Robin Garr's Wine Lovers' Page: As a very broad generalization, Harrington's site tends to be a little closer to Parker/Squires, whereas Garr's tends to be a little closer to Enemy Vessel. Unfortunately, both of them make what I believe to be the strategic mistake of splitting up their general wine discussions and their tasting notes into two different fora, so they require much more work to navigate. [Also, Garr's new software package at Netscape is just hideous. For instance, to find the fora, you have to scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page, where the links are in a tiny column on the far left.]My question, what will happen to the Robert Parker's and the Wine Spectators and every other player in the global wine industry once a 100 point wine can be bought at WalMart for $2. On npr.org, there is an article covering a recent tasting where a wine, nicknamed 2 Buck Chuck, won the top prize. From the article: When it comes to wine, some consumers still equate quality with price. But at the 28th Annual International Eastern Wine Competition, a $1.99 bottle of California Wine, the 2002 Charles Shaw Shiraz, beat out 2,300 wines to win a prestigious double gold medal. Hear NPR's Steve Inkseep.
That sort of thing is utterly irrelevant to serious wine geekdom.
You'd be amazed how quickly you can teach yourself to analyze things like aromatics, fruit, texture, and the like. You'd also be amazed at the sensitivity of the human nose and the human tongue. At the level of a serious wine geek [like Parker], you're easily capable of detecting chemicals in the range of single digit parts per BILLION [e.g. 3 parts per billion, 2 parts billion, etc], and some folks out at the far end of the bell curve might be able to go another order of magnitude lower than that.
It turns out that wine chemistry is a fantastically complex subject, and given what I know of non-linear dynamics, my gut instinct is that we won't have computer programs producing high-end luxury cuvees any time in the near future.
The wine industry is terrified that once wine is figured out, good wine will be cranked out on an industrial scale, by mixing ethyl alcohol, water, and flavoring.
What do you think Jesus added to the water to turn it into wine?
A few other thoughts: