It appears that the electronic tongue is superior to our human senses when it comes to detecting tainted wine. The researchers hope this will improve the quality of wine in the future.
It's something many wine connoisseurs only dream of: a palate so sensitive that he quickly notices the smallest changes in a wine's aroma. Electronic tongue of Washington State University He has it. The device (which bears little physical resemblance to a human tongue) can identify microorganisms in wine within a week after white wine has been tainted. By comparison, that's four weeks before the human team noticed these changes in smell.
The electronic tongue was developed and programmed by Caroline Ross's team to take a kind of “fingerprint” of wine samples. It contains seven different sensors covered by a membrane to measure potential differences between ions and molecules in a wine sample. After immersing the tongue in the liquid, the tongue “tastes” these compounds, from which it can deduce whether and with what the wine is tainted.
Wine tasting
To test the efficiency of the tongue, the researchers added four different microbes to different bottles of Riesling. When wine is contaminated with these microbes, various unpleasant odors appear, such as nail polish remover, geranium odor, and “rat” odors.
A group of 13 volunteers were then trained to recognize a range of flavor elements in Riesling wines based on their aroma. Both positive odors associated with good wine, and negative odors when the wine is tainted. The trained panel then had to evaluate the aroma of the different wines. Both good, uncontaminated wine as a control, and samples of contaminated wine that had been contaminated 7 to 42 days ago. The electronic tongue was assigned the same task. While the human panel did not begin to identify contamination in the samples until after 35 days, the electronic tongue did so a full 28 days earlier; After 7 days.
Other techniques
The innovation is good news for wine lovers. Because e-tongue is much faster than traditional tests like taste tests, smell tests and petri dish tests, winemakers can detect and address problems in wine much earlier, Ross says. However, the researcher believes that this analysis is best used to complement other methods of assessing wine quality, rather than replace it. “Only together do they provide good information about the overall quality of the wine.”
Researchers have previously tested the tongue in red wine. Then the electronic tongue took much longer to detect the presence of different microorganisms. Only from day 21 can a good distinction be made between contaminated and clean samples.
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