Wine has been an integral element of human society for millennia. Accounts of wine date as far back as Egyptian and Roman times and wine often has symbolic significance for certain religions. In modern times, wine is often the beverage of choice for social gatherings and celebrations. Unfortunately, despite its historical and contemporary significance, wine can often seem daunting and intimidating to many due to the oft use of strange and esoteric descriptors by wine professionals, or sommeliers (from French: ”wine steward”). Thus, we are motivated to ask the question: can machine learning help demystify wine and make it more accessible?

The La Silla-QUEST Low Redshift Supernova Survey is a part of the La Silla-QUEST Southern Hemisphere Variability Survey. The survey uses the 10 deg2 QUEST camera installed at the prime focus of the 1.0-m Schmidt Telescope of the European Southern Observatory at La Silla, Chile, and utilizes essentially all of the observing time of the telescope. The QUEST camera was installed on the ESO Schmidt telescope in 2009 after completing a 5 year variability survey in the northern hemisphere using the 1.2-m Oschin Schmidt telescope at Palomar. La Silla-QUEST started science operations in 2009 September. The low redshift supernova survey commenced in 2011 December and is planned to continue for the next 4 years. In this article we describe the instrumentation, software, operation, and performance characteristics of the survey.