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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."
In Soviet Russia, vinters are wery, wery cold.
Not vhen you drink wodka on a nuclear wessel.
Another issue with their formula: It implies that "If we add more X to mixture Y, it'll taste better."
When wine tasting, again, is such a subjective thing, even given the fact that they may be able to figure out what gives the wine more of a fruiter aftertaste, for example, they still don't know if they actually WANT a fruiter aftertaste.
Again, if we get the experts deciding what would make the wine taste "better" and then working with the machine to decide what can be done to make the wine taste the way the experts want, we're still only doing something that can probably be done already (IANAWineGeek, BTW) without the aid of an expensive machine. And one expert's "better" might be another expert's "ruined"
http://www.TheGamerNation.com/Forums
Not undrinkable, but creating a GOOD wine basically an art. You can't replace a Van Gogh with electronics. I CAN however see this being used to make low-quality cheap wines more consistant and a bit better while still keeping costs down.