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.
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 $500 either and took only a couple of days more...
"The fermentation chamber in the machine turns water, grape concentrate, yeast and a finishing powder into wine."
> The 'Miracle Machine' takes only three days and just a couple of dollars to make wine that would normally cost at least USD 20, its makers claim.
That sounds completely preposterous to me, unless wine is much more expensive in the US than it is here in France. Assuming that we are talking about the price of a single bottle of wine (which seems about right judging by the size of the device) 20$ 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.
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.
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.
"New machine turns ingredients of wine into wine."
Film at eleven.
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.
Home wine-making kits have been around since forever. Example sites:
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.
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.
I got excited because the title led me to think the machine somehow went directly from water to wine with no additional ingredients.
Where's the rest ? I mean the part containing the technical stuff, not the one saying "Miracle Machine".
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
I particularly remember a 7.3%ABV stout with strong overtones of "candied orange peel" among other things.
I bet most of wine you can buy in Russia is made with a machine like that :facepalm:
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.
Impossible, water does not contain the type off chemical elements needed to make wine.
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!!!!!
There is a 2000+ year old patent on that.
Let's call it Jesus Machine
Brilliant! So, you put in ingredients instead of pixie dust.
$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 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.