Record smells, play them back later

No, really.

Somboon's system will use 15 chemical-sensing microchips, or electronic noses, to pick up a broad range of aromas. These are then used to create a digital recipe from a set of 96 chemicals that can be chosen according to the purpose of each individual gadget. When you want to replay a smell, drops from the relevant vials are mixed, heated and vaporised. In tests so far, the system has successfully recorded and reproduced the smell of orange, lemon, apple, banana and melon.

They don't mention this possibility in the article, but this could be a boon to wine-lovers: record the bouquet of a particular wine, then play it back later while tasting a different wine so you can compare the two. Or simply save it into a library of wine odors to further educate your nose.

Does red wine help us sleep?

Italian scientists think so.

They claim it contains melatonin. Other scientists are unconvinced.

Drink enough of it, of course, and sleep you will, albeit under the table.

Improving grapes through genetic modification

Would you drink wine from genetically modified grapes?

I (Ed) would. They're not talking about putting in genes from spider monkeys or some such; just speeding up the kind of genetic development that would otherwise take decades of work, trying to get genes for, say, disease resistance from one kind of grape to another without altering the wine-making characteristics of the recipient grape.

The grapes wine are made of are already the result of, in some cases, centuries of cross-breeding. There's nothing particularly "natural" about most of them, in that they didn't evolve to their present state purely through natural processes; they had help from humans.

So what's the difference?

(Via Fermentation.)

Wine wiki

Check out EncycloWine, an online wiki (that is, user-written-and-edited) encylopedia focused strictly on wine. (Via Professor Bainbridge on Wine.)

We Willetts are wary of wikis (though not of alliteration), but this looks like a good one.

Cheap wine, strange names

Here's an interesting article on all those funkily named inexpensive wines on the market. We've tried and liked several of those mentioned. But (note to potential gift-buyers) we really really like the expensive stuff, too!