Home wine-making kits have been around since forever. Example sites:
http://www.homewinemaking.co.uk/wine_kits.html
I guess the main innovation is the sensors and the microcontroller? Is that new? It seems unlikely, but I'm not sure.
New machine turns water into wine in three days
31–40 of 48 posts
Re: New machine turns water into wine in three days
#32Cool tech if it actually delivers on the promise, but I'm going to need more than just one of the founders word that the wine it produces is indistinguishable from that which costs $20 per bottle. The name they have chosen doesn't help, a miracle machine should do something like cure cancer, not get people drunk. Even something like 'Wine-o-matic 4000' would have gone down better with me.
Re: New machine turns water into wine in three days
#33A friend of mine used to brew beer, a lot of the recipe books were written by this guy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Line
I particularly remember a 7.3%ABV stout with strong overtones of "candied orange peel" among other things.
Re: New machine turns water into wine in three days
#34Impossible, water does not contain the type off chemical elements needed to make wine.
Re: New machine turns water into wine in three days
#35I feel that using the term "wine" is misleading considering it is not made from fermented grapes. Not to mention that wine is one of those things that has a touchy-feely side and this system has none of the romance that many would argue helps define a good wine.
You can also take powders, process them and make yourself some nice cubic zirconia that looks a lot like diamond, but that doesn't change the fact that a diamond is a diamond and that shit you just made is not a diamond.
Re: New machine turns water into wine in three days
#36Impossible, water does not contain the type off chemical elements needed to make wine.
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Re: New machine turns water into wine in three days
#37I feel that using the term "wine" is misleading considering it is not made from fermented grapes. Not to mention that wine is one of those things that has a touchy-feely side and this system has none of the romance that many would argue helps define a good wine. You can also take powders, process them and make yourself some nice cubic zirconia that looks a lot like diamond, but that doesn't change the fact that a dia…
Not sure that's the best analogy. You can also take a bunch of starting material, process it, and make yourself an actual diamond.
Re: New machine turns water into wine in three days
#38> The 'Miracle Machine' takes only three days and just a couple of dollars to make wine that would normally cost at least USD 20, its makers claim. That sounds completely preposterous to me, unless wine is much more expensive in the US than it is here in France. Assuming that we are talking about the price of a single bottle of wine (which seems about right judging by the size of the device) 20$ would get you very hi…
>That sounds completely preposterous to me, unless wine is much more expensive in the US than it is here in France. It is. I'm used to similar pricing as you are being in Portugal, but in California 15-20$ is usually entry level pricing for good wine.
Oh. That makes sense then, I suppose this machine might have a market in the USA if it makes proper wine.
How come wine is so expensive over there anyway? They produce some don't they?
Re: New machine turns water into wine in three days
#39I can't help but remember the story of the Joseph Schlitz Brewing Company of Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
During their heyday, they made one of America's most popular beers. At the time there was a lot of interest in developing a faster fermentation process in an effort to make beer less expensive to produce. Schlitz got caught up in this - competition was fierce at the time - and ended up deciding to switch over to a continuous fermentation process and also started using extracts instead of more expensive traditional ingredients.
End result? The company was sunk within a decade. The new beer wasn't the same, and customers didn't like it. The flavor just wasn't there. That's really saying something when you're talking about an American-style adjunct lager, which isn't exactly the world's most full-flavored beer in the first place.
Which isn't to say that it's futile to try and come up with new processes for making fermented beverages. Companies like Miller and Anheuser-Busch have managed to figure out how to produce consistent, clean-tasting pale lagers in only a week or two where historically brewers would need to allow months of time for fermentation and cold conditioning. But they developed these processes incrementally. Attempts at radical, all-at-once re-envisioning of the processes for beer & winemaking seem to have a historical tendency to end up being radical failures.
Re: New machine turns water into wine in three days
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
>That sounds completely preposterous to me, unless wine is much more expensive in the US than it is here in France. It is. I'm used to similar pricing as you are being in Portugal, but in California 15-20$ is usually entry level pricing for good wine.
Oh. That makes sense then, I suppose this machine might have a market in the USA if it makes proper wine. How come wine is so expensive over there anyway? They produce some don't they?
California produces some but it's probably way too low of a volume to allow for the cheap prices wine countries are used to. In Portugal and I assume in France as well wine is made in pretty much all of the country. In the US there's a bit of California and not a lot more. Demand and supply does the rest.