I currently make beer, but if I was going to make wine, I'd instead look at sourcing good quality grapes, and just fermenting reasonably cool in a fridge rigged up to a PID.
On the topic of artificially aging wine this article is rather fascinating http://people.math.aau.dk/~cornean/index.html/ACwine.pdf where they use HV AC to apparently decrease the harshness of un-aged wine. Additionally if you did want to age wine you can get small oak barrels from ebay relatively cheaply.
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.
Worked like a dream, until I got caught.
Didn't cost $500 either and took only a couple of days more...
That sounds completely preposterous to me, unless wine is much more expensive in the US than it is here in France. Assuming that we are talking about the price of a single bottle of wine (which seems about right judging by the size of the device) 20$ would get you very high end wine. You can get good wine for a quarter of this price easily.
Brewing stuff at home is fun but this seems closer to kool aid than oenology. I'm not sure you would learn a great deal about wine making by using it. I'm not sure I see the appeal, unless as they seem to boast the wine ends up very good and much cheaper than simply buying it in a store.
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.
How come wine is so expensive over there anyway? They produce some don't they?
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.
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.
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..
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.
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.
... I'll show my self out..
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.
Film at eleven.
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.
