
New machine turns water into wine in three days - prht
http://www.financialexpress.com/news/new-machine-turns-water-into-wine-in-three-days/1232309
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deutronium
$500 seems rather excessive to me for something that is mainly presumably a
peltier, H-Bridge and MCU along with a bluetooth chip.

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](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.

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savrajsingh
It's priced on value to user, not component cost.

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nlh
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.

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

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bananas
I used to use old coke bottles, baby bottle sterilising tablets, cheap apple
juice, bread yeast, granulated sugar, an electric blanket and a condom to brew
cider when I was a kid.

Worked like a dream, until I got caught.

Didn't cost $500 either and took only a couple of days more...

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jpeg_hero
Ha! Prison "pruno" as a teenager. Did the parents find the shanks too :)

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bananas
LOL they didn't (and it was an army surplus machete) :)

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saalweachter
"The fermentation chamber in the machine turns water, grape concentrate, yeast
and a finishing powder into wine."

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simias
> 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 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.

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pedrocr
>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.

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simias
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?

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pedrocr
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.

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redler
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](https://www.wineinstitute.org/resources/statistics/article83)

[http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-12-27/french-bulk-wine-
pr...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-12-27/french-bulk-wine-prices-rise-
lifting-whites-to-three-year-high.html)

~~~
pedrocr
>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...](http://www.wineinstitute.org/files/2010_Per_Capita_Wine_Consumption_by_Country.pdf)

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bunderbunder
I 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.

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h4pless
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 diamond is a diamond and that shit you just made is not a diamond.

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

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h4pless
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.

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GFK_of_xmaspast
" 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).

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jamesbrownuhh
"New machine turns ingredients of wine into wine."

Film at eleven.

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da_n
Cool 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.

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troymc
Home wine-making kits have been around since forever. Example sites:

[http://www.homewinemaking.co.uk/wine_kits.html](http://www.homewinemaking.co.uk/wine_kits.html)

[http://www.homebrewusa.com/](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.

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bunderbunder
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.

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stefan_kendall3
If you find any cost savings in this, I'm guessing you're an alcoholic and
should probably avoid a make-it-at-home device.

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dhruvmittal
I got excited because the title led me to think the machine somehow went
directly from water to wine with no additional ingredients.

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Jugurtha
Where's the rest ? I mean the part containing the technical stuff, not the one
saying "Miracle Machine".

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apple314159
A link to the actual site is more useful:
[http://themiraclemachine.net/](http://themiraclemachine.net/)

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Jugurtha
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..

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mistercow
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.

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

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NAFV_P
A 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](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.

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anovikov
I bet most of wine you can buy in Russia is made with a machine like that
:facepalm:

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neilnoj
Do you really need a machine to add yeast to grape juice and seal it up to
ferment and make wine? I remember a kid doing this in my high school science
class.

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callesgg
Impossible, water does not contain the type off chemical elements needed to
make wine.

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graycat
Heck, I have a machine, quite inexpensive that will turn nothing into some of
the world's best wine instantly! Don't have to add water, grape concentrate,
etc. Instead, starting with a clean machine, just add some really good
wine!!!!!

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malkia
There is a 2000+ year old patent on that.

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walshemj
prior Art I think you mean

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achudars
Let's call it Jesus Machine

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krapp
Let's call the store they sell it in the Christ Complex.

... I'll show my self out..

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yawz
Brilliant! So, you put in ingredients instead of pixie dust.

