Inventor Adrian Cheok, profiled by Eliza Strickland at IEEE Spectrum, is “dedicated to building multisensory communication gadgets.” After building little haptic jackets for pet chickens (!), he’s setting his sites higher:

Cheok has a “digital lollipop” in the works that electrically and thermally stimulates the tongue to produce basic flavors—bitter, sour, salty, sweet. He dreams of a system that would let friends in Paris send you a taste of their wine over the Internet. “The ultimate Internet,” he says, “will integrate all our senses.”

This will never really work for wine, right? So much of the “flavor” of wine is olfactory. Stimulating the tongue couldn’t communicate even 1/10 of the real experience of drinking a particular wine.

It is nice to imagine Mourvèdre lollipops, though.