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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.
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
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!
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
Where's the fun in that?
H.
When VCR's are outlawed, only outlaws will have VCR's.
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 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.