VentureBeat

San Jose company, ProVina, has raised $4 million to market Winepod, a web-based software and wine unit that lets people make their own wine.

This is a wonderful idea, because it appeals to the multitude of wine snobs, as TheAlarmClock puts it — a potentially huge market. It saves you the bother of buying land and toiling away for seven years tending to fickle grapes, which true wine devotees often dedicate their entire lives to. Winepod does everything, from explaining where to get your grapes, to how to mix it all up in a self-contained home-size unit. It controls the heat of fermentation and appropriate aging temperature in a variable-capacity stainless steel tank, with an integrated wine press — all hooked up to your PC software. It lets you make wines like Sonoma Pinot Noir year round. All this for retail price of US $3,499, and there’s a waiting list.

It’s supposed to let you design it all for your own tastes, its investors say. The real taste is supposed to be in the grapes, so the only thing you’re really doing after you get the grapes is manufacturing the taste — heresy to real wine snobs, but something that is actually done by wineries all over the world. Perhaps this company isn’t so snobby after all. Crass is a better word, because the snobs will certainly look down on it.

VantagePoint Venture Partners led the $4 million round of financing. The company’s board includes Cypress Semiconductor CEO TJ Rodgers, known for his winery antics, including regular underground blasting that irritated his La Honda, Calif. neighbors.

Here’s the company’s announcement.

TJ Rodgers is chief executive of Cypress Semiconductor, which is the primary shareholder of the fast-growing silicon panel company, SunPower.

SunPower has excelled in the market by focusing on making silicon more efficient — even if silicon looks feeble compared to promise other, newer materials. CIGS (copper indium gallium selenide), for example, is cheaper and more flexible, scientists say — it can be sprayed like paint onto just about any surface.

But Rodgers, an outspoken Ayn Rand adherent, says silicon has been studied so much in recent decades, and is therefore so reliable, that his company will wipe out newcomers like Nanosolar, which is unveiling a product based on CIGS.

“Silicon has a reliability record which is unmatched by any other material,” he told CNET. “They could rename the company NanoDollar, because that’s all they are going to be left with after we get done kicking their butt,” Rodgers said referring to Nanosolar.

This is a counterpoint to the comments of venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, about how science trumps everything — when it comes to multiplying resources. Translation of science into actual business application is unpredictable, and can take a long time for superior science to take over a market.

We’ll see if this is true for Nanosolar, which is due out on the market soon.