The Death of the Art of Wine Tasting: Here’s the Electronic Tongue
Tongues have been wagging recently following reports that a team at the Barcelona Institute of Microelectronics in Spain had developed an electronic tongue -or a robot, if you like- that could easily pick excellent wines from a line of fakes.
The tongue was invented by Cecilia Jiménez-Jorquera and her colleagues at the famed institution and is reported in the Royal Society of Chemistry journal, The Analyst. She said of her innovation: “The device is based on similar principles to the human tongue and is sensitive to just five different tastes: sweet, salty, bitter, acidic and umami (savory).
Our results have demonstrated the potential of using multi-sensors as electronic tongues not only for distinguishing the samples according to the grape variety and the vintage year, but also for quantitative prediction of several sample parameters.”
Could these be “green” attributes of the new tongue, someone? It is said to be fast, portable, cheap to manufacture, and can be trained to “taste” new varieties as required.
As expected, since the reports, views and counter-views (over a glass of wine, of course) have been parlayed in hundreds of forums including blogs and even radio and TV talk shows in Spain but this certainly does not mark the death of the art of wine tasting.
