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Chemists Build App That Could Identify Cheap Replacements For Luxury Wines
schliz writes "Australian startup Wine Cue is combining the chemical composition of wines with customer ratings for what it hopes to be a more objective wine recommendation engine than existing systems that are based on historical transactions. The technology is likely to reach the market as a smartphone app, and could be used to identify cheap alternatives to expensive bottles."
If there is one thing that needs more objectivity its wine tasting.
Too often the results are the opinion of the person who bought the bottle, and too seldom is there truly blind taste testing by people not already familiar with the vintage.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Black Stump Bourdeaux is rightly praised as a peppermint flavored burgundy, whilst a good Sydney Syrup can rank with any of the world's best sugary wines.
Yes, exactly.
And this had better be an Android-only app.
The absolute last thing an IDevice owner wants to know is that his/her expensive purchase is objectively inferior to a cheaper alternative.
The horror! The horror!
If I were to do this stuff myself, I would probably use Partial Least Squares and build a regression model using the chemical composition as X, and the customer ratings as Y. Or depending on the number of variables in the chemical composition compared to the number of samples (wines), one of the Sparse Partial Least Squares variants might prove to give better predictions (and it would also be interesting to see which variables in X it discards as less important).
So, any word on what they do?
Dvorak on Doomtech
I'm not a wine snob, but I know there are certain things that sometimes you *can't* replicate.
After decades of analysis, we still can't build a violin as good as a Stradivarius. We still can't fully replicate Damascus Steel (OK, maybe the lack of a living slave in which to quench the blade is part of that :-P). I'd argue that fine liquors -- wines, whiskeys, etc... fall into that category. I'd say it's almost an art form.
I'll admit it, I have no evidence for that last assertion/argument. But I'm a romantic at heart,
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
BumWine.com lists the only wines you'll ever need.
I'll be honest, we're throwing science against the wall to see what sticks. -Cave Johnson
Verhoeven and Pendray claim they found the recipe for Damascus, and their paper sounds plausible to me. But reading (and understanding) metalurgy 101 is the extent of my knowledge. More to the point modern tool steel surpasses the original damascus in hardness, strength, and wear resistance. Also, Japanese swords don't cut gun barrels or cleave through armor like paper. I don't know anything about violins, but I know that good whiskey uses all the tech tricks it can. While it always comes down to one person's judgement making it (which I think does qualify it as art), science makes the art better. Also you can make better fudge with a microwave and an IR thermometer than with a gas stove and a candy thermometer. Blasphemy I know, but true. The way in which the microwave heats from the inside out with no agitation from the thermometer makes it creamier. I've been told liquid nitrogen makes the best icecream.
It is unromantic, but I suspect that gas chromatograph readings of tons of wines, fed into a pandora/netflix type singular value decomposition engine where thousands of people rate the wines, would result in good recommendations. You would want "channels" though, as you need more than just like or dislike for something with that many varieties.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
That is not to say that expensive wine does not provide value. You are paying for vintage grapes and expert winemakers, which all cost money.OTOH there is no reason to go into debt for a bottle of expensive wine anymore that one should go into debt for a Prada bag.
So what services like this provide is protection for those who want to be a part of a peer group but can't afford it. They can say how silly those rich people are for paying for expensive wine that is the same as the cheap wine. It really isn't the same, but it really doesn't matter. If there is someone who has the ability to authoritively say they are the same, then those who need to feel included can.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Welcome to Wine Cue!
INPUT: Chateau Petrus, 1998 vintage, Pomerol primarily of Merlot grapes, estimated retail 3500USD
RECOMMENDATION: Charles Shaw, 2010 vintage, Merlot, estimated retail 2USD
"FDA staff reviewers expressed concern about the number of patients who were left out of the study because they died."
Target house brand box red wine. That's right, you buy it at Target (at locations where they're allowed to sell wine).
The three varieties, Merlot, Shiraz, and blend are all good. It's like the best $12 bottle you've ever had -- not a typical $12 bottle, the best. The box is $16 and contains the equivalent of four bottles, of course with the self-sealing spigot and collapsing plastic bladder to prevent oxidation. Stays fresh for weeks or even months after opening -- provides a glass a day for three weeks.
I've had some spectacular wines. No, no, not the wines that cost hundreds of euros per bottle. but wines that could be described as "WOW. I didn't know wine could do that". It would be nice to have an app that would suggest similar wines, based on a chemical spectrum instead of "that estate had a truly extraordinary summer, and more recent vintages have not faired as well."
If a particular chemical is playing around with my brain,I want to know about it and be able to invite it around again sometime.
It's not just the basic chemicals but the molecules and how they are 'folded' which makes a MASSIVE difference to what happens.
,it was totally useless."
I predict this will be technically correct but completely useless, as seen in that classic joke about mathematicians:
Two Physicists were riding in a hot air balloon and were blown off course sailing over a mountain trail, and were completely lost.
They spotted a jogger running on the trail and they shouted "Can you tell us where we are?" After a few minutes, the jogger yelled back "You're up in a balloon."
One physicists said to the other, "Just our luck to run into a mathematician". "How do you know he was a mathematician?" asked the other.
"Well, in the first place he took a long time to answer; second, his answer was 100% correct and third,
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
Of course you cannot tell how good a wine tastes by some chemical analysis.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
1. There are already web sites where people review wines and tell you it's got great bang for the buck. Sometimes wines with the snooty "points" ratings will even fall into this category.
2. If their system gains traction, the deals will be arbitraged away. Pricey wines might fall a bit; but more likely the cheap quality wines will be able to raise their prices because of the publicity.
In other words, another fine thing spoiled by douche bags and "smart" phones.
Or just don't drink alcohol ever. Sorry, just had to throw that option out there. It's been working great for me so far.
I used to live about 15 minutes drive from the Barossa Valley. You can definately taste the difference between a $50 bottle and a $10 bottle, but having said that I don't believe the $600-2000 bottles are justified at all. I highly recommend the Yalumba Signature and Octavius wines. Bought at the cellar door they're ~$50/bottle tastes amazing. Much better value than the Grange Hermitage people love to harp on about from Penfolds. That starts at $600/bottle and goes up from there. I've tasted both of those wines within a day of each other and the Yalumba smashed the Grange out of the park.
I know there is a huge subjective element to wine, but one (yes, anecdotal) event comes to mind. I was at a dinner party, the host was serving very good wine after a couple of bottles she slipped in a Grange Hermitage of a particularly good vintage, after tasting it I immediately declared its awesomeness and my intention to buy a case of it, only then did she tell us what it was, and a case would cost more than my car. It would seem to me that while there is a subjective element, there is also an objective one.
I am asking because beer companies discovered that their most avid customers couldn't taste the difference between their products and their competitors products.
Develop your own sense for a good wine. Drink whatever you find, don't judge, don't look at the price. Also, serve wine in a group of people - the ones that are drunk rapidly are the good ones, the French say :)
Then you've built a palate and can try to find the wine for you. Always try local (~200km) suppliers, buy directly from the wineyard, because the quality is much better (no transports in heat, etc).
A perfect bottle for me is about 4EUR from a vineyard, so excellent wine needn't be expensive.
Also disregard ALL wine facists. They don't even have a clue.
Fuck me. Truly a first world problem.
There is a much simpler algorithm that achieves basically the same effect:
1. Recommend MD 20/20
2. Can user still remember that they blew money on this app?
Yes? GOTO 1
No? Exit
Cheap and effective, by the time you have downed the MD 20/20 you won't really care what the wine tastes like anymore.
Turning white wine into red wine:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-11044090
This guy says the four main variables in wine pairings are :
And I think it's refreshing, and also very sensible to think about wine in such "basic" terms. Even if you can detect all kinds of interesting flavours in wine, like world-class sommeliers do, I think those four variables are definitely going to influence your experience a lot more than anything else about the wine. Who cares if it has a hint of blueberry muffin or ripe apricot ? If it's too sweet or too acidic for your dish, you won't appreciate it as much.
Wouldn't it be nice if, in addition to alcoholic content, the labels on wine bottles clearly displayed the amount of sweetness, acidity, and astringency ? I'm talking about real numbers with some kind of scale. For instance, we already label bottles of vinegar with their acidity level, why not do the same for wine ? On bottles of Aszú Tokaji wine from Hungary, there's a number of puttonyos that range from 3 to 6, which give you a good idea of how sweet the wine is. I don't know of any other wine that gives you that kind of information on its label.
For me, the usual experience of buying a wine is looking at the prices, and reading the vague descriptions and suggested pairings on the labels.
Hilarious threads going on here. It's pure hubris on the part of chemists to think that they can exactly recreate any foodstuff 'from scratch' - any more than we should believe that Star Trek replicators are a current technology.
There's absolutely no need for wine snobbery, food snobbery or any kind of backlash against the snobbery. To put it into perspective, all you have to do is replace the word "wine" in the original article with "meat pie", and see how you get on believing it.
What would be great would be a wine De-Spotify Not only will it tell you what wine it is, but how to best remove it's stains! :)
Fudge doesn't have much water in it, just a cup of creme. Butter, sugar, and cocoa aren't polar I don't think, so I would guess they let it pass. Making bread in the microwave doesn't work so well because the middle of the loaf turns to charcoal before the outside gets cooked.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
It tastes better and its better for you and the environment. Why do people still drink whine? I have tested a lot of wines (since my wife insists on it) I even tasted Romanée-Conti at 500EUR for a glass and it wasn't bad but it cant compete with an ice cold Pabst! So there!
penetration is not like a brick wall, where it stops all of a sudden, rather the "skin depth" is the depth at which the field is reduced to exp(-1) (e.g. about 38%). Combine this with the fact that food is typically not an "infinite slab" and the heating isn't quite what you'd think. Consider a cylinder.. a cube of stuff in the middle is receiving power from all directions, not just from one side. A cube of stuff at the edge is receiving power (mostly) from one side.
Also, the skin depth depends on the dielectric constant and the conductivity: hence the problem with thawing frozen meat: ice doesn't absorb well, water does, so the already melted part absorbs more energy, leading to raw/cooked zones. Sugar and water isn't very lossy, so although epsilon is fairly big (shortening the wavelength), conductivity is low, so you get good even heating. A bigger issue with microwave heating is superheating: the power distribution is so even, that you don't get localized density gradients to trigger localized boiling.
And I know it's declasse here on Slashdot to actually cite numbers, but here are some "penetration depth" for tissues at 2 GHz.. it scales with 1/sqrt(f), so at 2.45GHz, it's not a whole lot different). In general, humans have a relative permittivity of about 40-50 and a conductivity of about 1 S/m, if you want to do your own calculations.
fat: 14 cm
muscle: 2.7 cm
bone: 3.6cm-5.9cm (cancellous, cortical)
blood: 1.9cm
blood vessel: 3 cm
brain grey matter: 2.5 cm
...simplicity in wine labelling:
"A fine-bodied Cabernet Sauvignon, with rich chocolate and blackberry notes. Will get you shitfaced."
However, I don't want a taste for fine wine. I made this mistake with beer. After college I got a taste for good beer. It did not make me any happier, it only stifled my enjoyment of cheap beer. I would rather be ignorant and happy with $8 box wine than refined and unhappy with $15 wine.
I drink maybe a bottle of wine per year (a glass here, a glass there) plus maybe the equivalent of 2-3 bottles of sparkling wine (champagne, prosecco, or asti). Wine gives me awful hangovers, worse than overdrinking whisky or beer, and generally it doesn't appeal to me -- kind of bitter and unsatisfying.
Until about 2 years ago if you had asked me about wine, my instincts would have been that it's 95% bullshit and 5% reality (the difference between jug table wine and a $20 bottle of wine).
And then I got dragged to a fairly serious wine tasting (the wines being sold were $75-100 bottle) and I had to change my opinion. All of these wines were really good -- I really enjoyed drinking them and it took self control to not pick up a case of one of the reds.
I still don't drink wine, but I have changed my opinion. I think there is a qualitative difference between wines, but I don't know how you navigate this. I don't think price is a reliable indicator (snob appeal) nor do I think that recommendations are necessarily good either (herd appeal, snob appeal). Brand identity might help, but listening to the wine guy at the tasting it was clear that many of these bottles are vinted with grape blends from several orchards, diluting the value of brand unless the brand is really just the vintner.
There's a researcher (who is also a trained sommelier) who is using chemistry to produce unconventional wine/food pairings based on underlying shared aromatic compounds. Seems to be working well for him.
I'd buy one of these if it could tell me if what I'm buying is what I think I'm buying and not some counterfeit...
Would be nice if it worked for liquor as well given how much poison is out there on the market at this point.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
than any other commodity, except maybe audio equipment. Anything that cuts through some of the bullshit is welcome.
Of course, those of you with sophisticated palates who enjoy fine wines will have no use for such a mechanistic means of judgment and will disregard it. However, this development should please you as it provides yet another reason to turn your noses up at the unwashed masses who would be so ignorant as to select a wine based on chemical composition.
We have already been down this road. Claiming two things taste the same because they are molecularly similar is pure fallacy. This has been proven time and time again. This app will be just shy of worthless.
I bet the replacements are all made by Monsanto. Now even the Wine industry is under attack.