Jeffress Engineering BevScan wine analyser

BevScan is a device that can be used to analyse and classify wines without opening the bottle or disturbing the contents in any way.

The device will have applications as diverse as beverage quality control, wine distribution, wine authentication, storage/cork damage and wine substitution detection.

BevScan uses a simple beam of light passing through the bottle as its measuring technique, thus providing an environmentally friendly process requiring no chemicals, consuming very little power and leaving the wine or beverage totally unaffected. It has been specifically designed for use by less experienced operators, making the testing cost effective.

A product of South Australian company Jeffress Engineering, and with spectroscopic techniques developed in conjunction with The Australian Wine Research Institute, BevScan is the result of five years of research and uses Vis-NIR spectroscopy to determine the constitution of wine and bottle. Statistical processing support was provided by CAMO AS.

The device employs sophisticated electro-optics, computers and statistical mathematics hidden behind a simple touch-screen interface to provide easy-to-interpret results signalled with traffic light-style indicators.

The power of BevScan depends on a locally developed technology called SimCal. By analysing a small number of known good bottles of wine with BevScan, a similarity signature (SimCal) is derived, against which unknown bottles are then compared. A SimCal value or ‘score’ is determined for each unknown sample and either a match or mismatch is signalled by a simple red/green indicator and an easy-to-understand graph on the touch screen. Remarkably, a reading can be completed in just a few seconds so the device can process large numbers of samples quickly.