A Taste of Red and White
15th January 2016 - A taste of red and white
T’was the week before new year and there I was seated in the garden, glass of wine to hand, perusing the two books my family had given me for Christmas. The first was Martin Ford’s award-winning The Rise of the Robots; it’s very thought provoking and will no doubt feature in several future newsletters. The second book was the 2016 Platters Guide to South African wines. As I read the introduction, in which the editor describes how a team of wine experts fan out across the wine growing regions of the country to taste all the wines, my eyes started to glaze over....
Suddenly I found myself in a room with a Robotaster. It must have been an early version modelled on the robots displacing people in factories everywhere. Like the dragoon officers who sliced open bottles with their sabres, the machine merely decapitated each bottle in the line – after all, what’s a few glass shards to a mechanical mouth? The next version was much fancier and could detect the shapes of bottles and remove corks and screw caps.
A Robonose sampled the air immediately above the liquid before a sample was sucked into the Robomouth. Before you could even say Jancis Robinson, the wine sample had been tasted, a Japanese toilet like affair was cleansing the mouth and the machine was spitting out a detailed write up on the wine. You would have thought it had been written by a real human taster, not surprising considering it had been fed tens of thousands of wine reviews from around the world. In fact it could do it in multiple languages together with recipes for the perfect food pairing.
As word of the wondrous Robotaster got out, wine producing countries everywhere produced their own machines. Redundant human wine tasters fell by the wayside in droves. A Californian entrepreneur raised a billion dollars and produced the ultimate Ubertaster which soon displaced all the others from the market. Google and Facebook faced off to buy the beast for billions more. Google made a software version available in the cloud which owners of wine estates everywhere started to use to make the perfect wine without even having to employ an expert winemaker. A Chilean vintner triumphantly cloned the Vin de Constance 1812 so beloved of Napoleon in his St Helena exile.
Next Amazon and Alibaba teamed up to provide a service where you could use your phone to order any wine produced anywhere in the last three hundred years and an hour later a drone would show up on your doorstep to deliver a case reverse engineered for your own personal consumption. This was seized on by millions of Chinese connoisseurs who vied to impress their guests with the best Bordeaux new growths of 1972 and even as far back as 1896. The price of authentic vintage wines took a bad knock and producers in expensive domains went out of business like a row of dominoes. So too did all the companies and experts in the traditional wine logistics chain.
At this point in my reverie I woke with a start, sweating nervously. With shaking hand I lifted my glass to my mouth. Ah, yes, it certainly was the real Dassies Rood which my own personal palate had adjudged 2015 wine of the year. I raised my glass further and toasted my trusty newsletter readers – happy new year and may 2016 be a vintage year of imagining the future with you all!
T’was the week before new year and there I was seated in the garden, glass of wine to hand, perusing the two books my family had given me for Christmas. The first was Martin Ford’s award-winning The Rise of the Robots; it’s very thought provoking and will no doubt feature in several future newsletters. The second book was the 2016 Platters Guide to South African wines. As I read the introduction, in which the editor describes how a team of wine experts fan out across the wine growing regions of the country to taste all the wines, my eyes started to glaze over....
Suddenly I found myself in a room with a Robotaster. It must have been an early version modelled on the robots displacing people in factories everywhere. Like the dragoon officers who sliced open bottles with their sabres, the machine merely decapitated each bottle in the line – after all, what’s a few glass shards to a mechanical mouth? The next version was much fancier and could detect the shapes of bottles and remove corks and screw caps.
A Robonose sampled the air immediately above the liquid before a sample was sucked into the Robomouth. Before you could even say Jancis Robinson, the wine sample had been tasted, a Japanese toilet like affair was cleansing the mouth and the machine was spitting out a detailed write up on the wine. You would have thought it had been written by a real human taster, not surprising considering it had been fed tens of thousands of wine reviews from around the world. In fact it could do it in multiple languages together with recipes for the perfect food pairing.
As word of the wondrous Robotaster got out, wine producing countries everywhere produced their own machines. Redundant human wine tasters fell by the wayside in droves. A Californian entrepreneur raised a billion dollars and produced the ultimate Ubertaster which soon displaced all the others from the market. Google and Facebook faced off to buy the beast for billions more. Google made a software version available in the cloud which owners of wine estates everywhere started to use to make the perfect wine without even having to employ an expert winemaker. A Chilean vintner triumphantly cloned the Vin de Constance 1812 so beloved of Napoleon in his St Helena exile.
Next Amazon and Alibaba teamed up to provide a service where you could use your phone to order any wine produced anywhere in the last three hundred years and an hour later a drone would show up on your doorstep to deliver a case reverse engineered for your own personal consumption. This was seized on by millions of Chinese connoisseurs who vied to impress their guests with the best Bordeaux new growths of 1972 and even as far back as 1896. The price of authentic vintage wines took a bad knock and producers in expensive domains went out of business like a row of dominoes. So too did all the companies and experts in the traditional wine logistics chain.
At this point in my reverie I woke with a start, sweating nervously. With shaking hand I lifted my glass to my mouth. Ah, yes, it certainly was the real Dassies Rood which my own personal palate had adjudged 2015 wine of the year. I raised my glass further and toasted my trusty newsletter readers – happy new year and may 2016 be a vintage year of imagining the future with you all!
Proudly powered by Weebly