Wine tasting robot

A robot that can ‘taste’ wine has been developed by researchers in Japan. Initially, the robot-sommelier was created to taste and identify foods, but now its technology can name certain wine brands, comment on the taste of the wine and recommend foods that might go well with it. The two-foot tall ‘wine-bot’, which has eyes, a head that swivels and a mouth that lights up when it talks, analyses the wine by firing off a beam of infrared light from its left arm. However, clever as it is, sommeliers needn’t fear for their jobs just yet. The robot can only distinguish between just a few dozen varieties and struggles if the bottle has been opened for a while because that causes the wine to tranform chemically.