A grapeful discovery: Reservoir computing with wine beads

In this work, we introduce encapsulated wine beads as a novel, edible material for unconventional and neuromorphic computing. When encapsulated in alginate beads, wine, a complex mixture of proteins, organic acids, sugars, metal ions, and volatiles, exhibits nonlinear electrical behavior and memory effects governed by ox-redox processes. These responses show plasticity-like features, allowing programmable resistance states. The wine beads can be leveraged for computing, and to demonstrate this potential, the wine bead was used as a single-node reservoir for classification tasks. Our findings indicate that the resistance is programmable, exhibits a high degree of repeatability, and can be used for reservoir computing scenarios.