Tongue-tied Japanese Dalek - the future of wine tasting

Would the Oscar-winning 2004 film Sideways perhaps have been a touch funnier if the scriptwriter had insisted they transport an oenophile R2-D2 in the back of their Saab convertible?

Imagine a Dalek enunciating the following words: "buttery", "herby", "oaky". Now try: "Sauvignon Blanc" or "Valpolicella." Now imagine it is a Japanese Dalek.

You may just have heard the future of wine tasting.

Researchers in Japan have invented a robot that can check the chemical composition of wine and advise its owner of the best vino for their palate.

The robot, devised by NEC System Technologies and Mie University, works by pointing an infrared sensor at the tip of its left arm at a bottle.

When it has identified the grape, the robot comments on the taste - for instance stating whether the Chardonnay is buttery or the Shiraz full-bodied.

The machine can perform the same task for food, assessing the saltiness of cheese or distinguishing between bitter and sweet apples. But it is the electro-mechanical sommelier's wine-tasting prowess that has excited its creators.

"There are all kinds of robots out there doing many different things. But we decided to focus on wine because that seemed like a real challenge," said Hideo Shimazu, of NEC System Technology.

"Wines are notoriously similar in their spectral fingerprints. The variation this robot detects is very subtle."

Although the 60cm-tall robot can already identify dozens of different wines, its culinary ability is imperfect; it deemed the hand of a visiting reporter to be ham and a cameraman to be bacon.

At present, the android is not for sale but winemakers believe it has a potential for analysing the authenticity of old and expensive wine. It could also come in handy for ordinary drinkers seeking to demystify the occasionally arcane world of wine and navigate the sea of esoteric adjectives.

Certainly the public has a desire to explore the complexity of the grape, both to learn more about producer countries, regions and varieties and to check out the latest vintages.

Amateurs can get squiffy trying out the wines but few match the bawdy adventures of friends Miles and Jack in the Oscar-winning 2004 film Sideways, during a road trip round California's wineries. (Would it have been funnier if the scriptwriter had insisted they transport an oenophile R2-D2 in the back of their Saab convertible?)

Wine-tastings are primarily commercial opportunities for vineyards, importers, merchants, and off-licences to showcase and sell wine. They can also be done blind in competitions and be run as educational events organised by wine appreciation societies.

The tastings remind us of the extraordinary palate of a human. The average person has up to 10,000 taste buds, the invisible cells which sit on the tongue under tiny red dots called papillae.

These taste buds can distinguish between five main tastes: sweet, sour, bitter, salty and a fifth identified by the Japanese in 1909, umami.

For important evolutionary reasons, they differentiate between foods - sugar indicates the presence of carbohydrates while bitterness indicates poison.

The same taste buds allow a connoisseur to identify which of the dozens of champagne houses a fizz comes from, because each has subtle differences deriving from location and production.

Some people taste things more intensely than others; a quarter of the population are "super-tasters" with a high density of taste papillae, half are normal and a quarter fall into the unfortunate category of "non-tasters".

When assessing a wine, a taster first checks the label for its origin, alcohol level, and design of bottle - which may give away its producer's traditional or modern outlook.

Next the colour reveals the age; for instance a purple wine is a young red while an aged wine will be orange-red.

"The bouquet" imparts a vast amount of information and is almost as important as the tasting itself.

Finally, a generous sip swilled around the mouth should cover all those taste receptors. Oz Clarke, wine expert and author, advises on his website: "Take a decent mouthful, so that your mouth is about one-third full and hold the wine in your mouth for a few moments, breathing in your nose ...

"Note any toughness, acidity and sweetness that the tongue detects, then enjoy the personality and flavour of the aromas in your nasal cavity. Now gently 'chew' the wine, letting it coat your tongue, teeth and gums."

Perhaps one key drawback of Japan's vino robot is that it cannot take part in a real testing; it cannot check a wine once it has been opened because the air changes its chemical structure.

In any case, it cannot drink the wine because liquid and electronic circuitry rarely mix.

And it does not have the thousands of invisible taste buds located in one of the most complex and magical parts of the human body - the tongue.

Atsushi Hashimoto, an engineering professor at Mie University, predicted that with some refinement in coming years the robot could be used by wineries to test every bottle without undoing the cork. He said: "It's still like a child. But not a completely ignorant one."

- INDEPENDENT