Winebot
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Daily App: Winebot is your personal assistant for wine
Clueless about wine, but want to learn more so you can enjoy its taste and many health benefits? Then you should check Winebot from Jonathan Burns as it was developed just for you. Winebot is your personal assistant for wine. First and foremost, it'll help you find the perfect wine based on color, meal, taste, price and more. Once you follow the steps and fill in the criteria about a wine, Winebot will recommend a type of wine specifically for you. The recommended choices are not specific brands, but categories of wine. For example, I had US$30 to spend on a crisp and refreshing, red wine to pair with a red meat dinner. WineBot recommended a Pinot Noir as its first choice, with a Cabernet Sauvignon or a Montepulciano as a backup. Once you've received your recommendation, you can add the wine to your cellar with the name of the wine and the year included in your record. If you are all done, you can hit the "Thanks! All Done" button and go back to the main screen. Other options in Winebot include the ability to manage your own wine cellar within the app. As noted above, the app allows you to add a wine to your cellar following a recommendation. You also can choose to "Open or Save?" a wine from the main screen. When you add a wine manually, you have the ability to enter the year, varietal, cost and name. Winebot will survey your new bottle of wine and tell you whether you should store it or drink it based on its age, variety, etc. Winebot is definitely geared for the new wine enthusiast who is learning about wines and is building a growing collection. Though the recommendations are helpful, I would love to see more information about the wines instead of just recommendation. Recommendations are helpful, but they don't tell you why you should buy that wine. What's distinctive about Pinot Noir? What makes a Muscat a Muscat? And why would one drink that particular wine with a fish-focused meal? Winebot is available for US$0.99 from the iOS App Store.
NEC's winebot detects fraudulent bottles
Apparently wine fraud is big business, with certain less-than-reputable vineyards watering down their Cabernet with a little Merlot, for instance, or even filling their supposedly boutique bottles with some off-the-shelf Manischewitz. Well the engineers / wine connoisseurs over at NEC have had enough, so they've invented a wine-tasting "robot" that can distinguish between 30 distinct varieties using only a five-milliliter sample. We've already seen NEC use infrared light in a food-tasting bot, and now they've taken a similar approach with this new device -- about twice the size of a three-liter wine box (mmm...box o' wine) -- which uses LEDs to fire infrared light at a sample and an array of photodiodes to interpret the resulting reflection. Until they can boost its recognition abilities to include many more varieties of wine (about 1,000, in fact), though, this project is little more than an academic exercise -- meaning you'll still need to bring your corkscrew to the liquor store if you want to ensure that you're getting a quality product.
