New machine turns water into wine in three days • Hacker News Board

Re: New machine turns water into wine in three days

#41

Post by bunderbunder » Sun, Mar 09, 2014, 6:22 PM UTC

simias wrote: post #38

pedrocr wrote: post #30

Earlier 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?

There's very little culture of having table wine here in the US, and that allows pricing in the market to come a bit unhinged. And wine's heavy, and for most Americans it needs to be shipped in from far away. Even when it's domestic - I imagine the shipping cost to get a bottle of French wine to me is actually lower than the cost for a bottle of Californian.

Also, Carlo Rossi. I think a lot of us still haven't quite managed to banish the memory of that wine.

Re: New machine turns water into wine in three days

#42

Post by bunderbunder » Sun, Mar 09, 2014, 6:33 PM UTC

troymc wrote: post #31

Home wine-making kits have been around since forever. Example sites: http://www.homewinemaking.co.uk/wine_kits.html http://www.homebrewusa.com/ I guess the main innovation is the sensors and the microcontroller? Is that new? It seems unlikely, but I'm not sure.

It's the convenience factor. Making good wine at home using traditional techniques requires a lot of skill and time. For some people that's fun, for others it isn't.

I think it's sort of like bread machines. There's definitely an allure to appliances that let you take most of the labor out of making things at home while still getting to call them homemade.

Re: New machine turns water into wine in three days

#43

Post by h4pless » Sun, Mar 09, 2014, 6:38 PM UTC

GFK_of_xmaspast wrote: post #37

h4pless wrote: post #35

I 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.

So swap out synthetic diamond for cubic zirconia for the analogy. Synthetic diamond and geological diamond aren't priced so differently because of their chemical composition. The way they're made is an integral part of what defines them and how they're valued.

There is a reason a flawless 1 carat natural diamond might cost you somewhere around $18,000 and a flawless 1 carat synthetic diamond will cost you maybe $100-200. And you can't put either a synthetic diamond or cubic zirconia on a ring and market it as a diamond ring.

The point is, that a big part of what defines wine for me is the process of making it. The process is why some wines cost $200 a bottle and some cost $5. And that process which partly defines the wine is completely missing from this system. (Not to mention that the other part: fermented grape juice, is also completely missing from this system) So labeling the resultant wine flavored fermented kool-aid from this machine as "wine", seems wrong to me.

Re: New machine turns water into wine in three days

#44

Post by redler » Sun, Mar 09, 2014, 6:47 PM UTC

pedrocr wrote: post #40

simias wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In 2012, France produced 41.3 million hectoliters of wine, and the US produced 28.4 million hectoliters. 88 percent of US production was from California.

So it's true that US wine is primarily from California, and it's true that France produces significantly more. But it's also true that the US does produce quite a bit.

One might speculate that some of the price difference is due to the kind of market that evolves when, culturally, wine is not consumed as frequently as an everyday staple of the dinner table, but rather as something for special occasions.

References:

https://www.wineinstitute.org/resources/statistics/article83

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-12-27/french-bulk-wine-pr...

Re: New machine turns water into wine in three days

#45

Post by Jugurtha » Sun, Mar 09, 2014, 6:50 PM UTC

mistercow wrote: post #14

Jugurtha wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm wondering how hard it would be to reverse engineer this, reading the "we're keeping the exact science under wraps". It's an "Arduino microcontroller" -I wonder who came up with this expression, since the Arduino is the board -. How can someone customize it to make a different kind of liquor.. Or connect two of which functions are inverse: Water into wine, and then into water again..

Liquor is distilled, so the only way you could customize it to produce liquor would be to add a considerable amount of hardware to it. In the US, doing so would be illegal without a license.

And there goes my dream evaporated ... To be condensed, if you know what I mean :)

Re: New machine turns water into wine in three days

#46

Post by Jugurtha » Sun, Mar 09, 2014, 6:54 PM UTC

nlh wrote: post #17

On a marketing note: I get why they've chosen this name, but I think it's a bad idea. It raised all of my snake oil red flags initially. I checked out the page and it does seem like a real project, and could be pretty cool. But I think attaching a hyperbolic "miracle" name to an otherwise interesting home winemaking device hurts their credibility.

Exactly. I wouldn't be surprised at all if "The Jesus Machine" came out while brainstorming..

Re: New machine turns water into wine in three days

#47

Post by pedrocr » Sun, Mar 09, 2014, 7:25 PM UTC

redler wrote: post #44

pedrocr wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In 2012, France produced 41.3 million hectoliters of wine, and the US produced 28.4 million hectoliters. 88 percent of US production was from California. So it's true that US wine is primarily from California, and it's true that France produces significantly more. But it's also true that the US does produce quite a bit. One might speculate that some of the price difference is due to the kind of market that evolves wh…

>So it's true that US wine is primarily from California, and it's true that France produces significantly more. But it's also true that the US does produce quite a bit.

By your numbers France produces 145% of what the US does while having 20% of the population. So per-capita it produces a lot more wine. On the other hand the French drink more wine. I found a table of consumption per capita[1] and looked up the populations of France and the USA on wolfram alpha. The end result is that France produces 142% of it's consumption, while the US produces 95% of its consumption.

So the French need to export their wine to find a market, and that's probably only easy for the high-end stuff. That should make entry-level but still good wine easy to buy. That's certainly our experience in Portugal as well. It's one of the barometers I use for the state of our wine industry. If I can still find good 2-5€ bottles of wine on the supermarket it means we're still not good enough at exporting it.

[1] http://www.wineinstitute.org/files/2010_Per_Capita_Wine_Cons...

Re: New machine turns water into wine in three days

#48

Post by GFK_of_xmaspast » Mon, Mar 10, 2014, 12:45 AM UTC

h4pless wrote: post #43

GFK_of_xmaspast wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure that's the best analogy. You can also take a bunch of starting material, process it, and make yourself an actual diamond.

So swap out synthetic diamond for cubic zirconia for the analogy. Synthetic diamond and geological diamond aren't priced so differently because of their chemical composition. The way they're made is an integral part of what defines them and how they're valued. There is a reason a flawless 1 carat natural diamond might cost you somewhere around $18,000 and a flawless 1 carat synthetic diamond will cost you maybe $100-…

" There is a reason a flawless 1 carat natural diamond might cost you somewhere around $18,000 and a flawless 1 carat synthetic diamond will cost you maybe $100-200. "

That reason's quite probably "the deBeers marketing machine". The only difference between a synthetic diamond and an actual diamond is one's grown in a cleanroom and the other's dug out of the ground by exploited miners (and sometimes actual slaves).