Wine Quality Sensor

[MadScientist]

Hi everyone,

I am a Google engineer who've built a wine quality detector. My sensor can pick up a wide variety of chemicals at levels as low as parts per million (ppm).

With no background in wine production myself, I have a few questions regarding how winemakers perform quality control at their facilities.

These questions are:

1. Do commercial winemakers care about uniformity and consistency in their wine?

2. After grapes are harvested, what methods can winemakers employ to alter the taste of their wine? For example, if a the grapes from a particular harvest is too sweet, is there anything the winemaker can do to change this?

3. I understand that there are inherent variations associated with harvests from different years (hence the year of the wine actually matters). Do winemakers strive to achieve a certain level of consistency across different years?

4. Besides ethanol, do winemakers quantify other chemicals present in wine?
The list of chemicals that we can detect are:
Sugar: Glucose, Sucrose and Frutose
Acid: Acetic Acid, Citric, Isocitric, Lactic, Tartaric and Malic
Impurities: Volatile Phenols, Geosmine, Haloanisoles, Methoxypyranzines
Others: Catechin, Epicatechin, Gallocatechin gallate, Myricetin, Resveratrol,
Quercetin, Syringic acid, Hydroxybenzaldehyde, p-Vanillin

(Are there other chemicals that you would like to test?)

 

[sour_grapes]

Just out of curiosity, what does Google want with analytical chemists?

Your questions numbers 1 and 3 seem to be the same, as far as I can tell. Yes, many mass-market commercial winemakers strive for consistency from harvest to harvest, because we (their dumb audience) wants the same thing every time we open one of their bottles.

For your question #2, there are, of course, a host of winemaking techniques. Far too many to try to run down here. I should point out that, however, in the US there are a fair amount of restrictions on what a commercial winemaker is allowed to add to his/her wine.

I cannot comment on your question #4, but you may be on to something there.

Hope that helped at all. Good luck with your device.

 

[salcoco]

I would suggest you visit a commercial winery, I assume there is a few in California and ask them thee questions.
Amateur wine makers are usually only need to detect tartaric acid and malic acid in the wine, also residual sugar. the other elements are available from a lab, which are for the curious or in the event of commercial winery a necessity. Govt regulations require that these tests be conducted by an approved method usually a qualified laboratory. your device sound nice but may not be legal for commercial winery and not affordable for amateurs.

 

[Jc5066]

Just out of curiosity, what does Google want with analytical chemists?
.

Don't you know that Google is trying to take over the world?