A better mousetrap?!?

A friend turned me on to this article and as he suspected was simply too good to pass up for comment:

Wine Scanner Has Perfect Palette

The gist of it is that some dude along with a few UC Davis profs got together and designed a CAT Scan machine for wine. From the article:

MRI technology can detect bad wine by analyzing the chemical compounds found in the drink. Bottles under investigation are placed inside a 6-foot, boiler-like cylinder, and radio waves are shot through them.

The compounds that make wine taste bad -- acetic acid, or vinegar, and acid aldehyde, another distasteful compound -- absorb radio waves at different rates than wine that's still good.

Admittedly, I am no scientist. I do however have a healthy curiousity for the study of things and straight-away, I have a couple of thoughts. First off, maybe I'm wrong but are the brothers acid (acetic and aldehyde) the only things that cause wine to taste off or fouled? I should think not but then again, I am no expert. And what about TCA (corked wine)? Can it tell you about that? I guess it doesn't really matter because in the event that you get a bad bottle, you can go get one of these. Look Ma!!! No more TCA!!

Secondly, am I wrong or is going through a CAT scan a less than desirable thing to do? Don't the people administering the process hide behind shit for fear of exposure? Would or could this have a potential impact on the health of the wine? I would have to think so. But more importantly, good luck trying to find some retailer that's going to let you step out the door with 10-12 cases of First Growth Bordeaux - unpaid - so you can have some jackhole shoot x-rays at them.

But it gets better:

"It's more sensitive than the human palette," said Mulvihill. "This is not a subjective thing, this is science. This is absolute. We can tell exactly how much acid aldehyde is in there with the MRI."

Here is where Old Man Mulvihill starts getting a little carried away. It seems to me that many things in science are very much subjective, not the least of which is wine. Sure, you may be able to tell me how much acid is in the wine, but what about the other components? Is this the future of wine? Similar to your 'sleep number', people can now find out what level of acid they can tolerate in a wine and base their buying habits on that? But he doesn't stop there:

"I just tested 30 bottles that were bought at auction and 12 were not perfect," said Mulvihill. "A lot of the wine out there is off. It's not good."

I'm going to go this step by step. First off, pay attention to the word 'auction'. Dr. Strangelove makes no mention of the provenance of said wine - was it stored in the caves of the Domaine or did they come out of a woodshed in North Florida? Secondly, as per his 'not subjective' comment earlier, what's this with the word 'perfect'? The Ford Pinto was 'perfect' for apparently more than one person in this world. Of course, those who bought one obviously had no concern for styling or performance. And 12 out of 30? My rough knowledge of numbers makes that come out at around 40%!!! That's even higher than the totally absurd numbers that are tossed about concerning corkage rates.

Mr. Mulvihill, best of luck. I'd love to help you out, but I'm all stocked up on crazy.