Machine against man in wine tasting competition.  Add/Read Comments

Students from seven European universities have just finished the Foss Challenge competition. They competed against each other to develop a calibration for a Foss WineScan Flex analyser so it could be used to determine the price of a wine. Normally, WineScan analysers are used during wine production to measure such attributes as ethanol and organic acids. The winning team, Kim Houng Ngo and Martin Andersen from Aalborg University, Denmark, used their calibration and the wine analyser to compete against a panel of wine experts in predicting the price level; region and quality for a number of wines.

Chemie.de
"The wine analyser results came close to the expert's judgement, especially when predicting region and quality level for wine at lower prices. But both the panel and the wine analysers had problems when predicting the price of the more expensive wines. The expert's ability to judge the finer points of the wines allowed them to get closer to the actual price."