Matematicas Y Vino

Applied Mathematics and Computation 192 (2007) 180–190 www.elsevier.com/locate/amc

Mathematics and wine
Stefano De Marchi
Department of Computer Science, University of Verona, 37134 Verona, Italy

Abstract The aim of the paper is twofold. Firstly, to show that mathematics can also be used to describe many facts and aspects related to wine and especially wine tasting. Secondly, we wouldlike to show that the wine is a chaotic dynamical system that, thanks to mathematics, can be properly studied. This can help wine makers and wine tasters to understand better. Ó 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Applied mathematics; Wine tasting; French paradox

1. Introduction The ‘‘leitmotif’’ of this paper is essentially the importance of mathematics in all aspects of real lifeand also in many aspects connected to the most important beverage of the ancient world, wine. Thanks to the various applications of mathematics, people have started to think of mathematics not only as a arid topic for ‘‘strange’’ persons called mathematicians, but as a basic and fundamental tool that everyone should understand, as much as they can, because mathematics can help to model almosteverything. The one who is writing this paper is a mathematician that for fun one day decided to learn more about wine tasting and took the course for becoming a sommelier. A sommelier judges a wine following the so called sensorial analysis which from the mathematical point of view is an algorithm and in fact, on studying the official books of the Italian Sommeliers Association [1], one can see manyways of modeling the wine tasting in a mathematical framework. The paper is indeed an attempt to show the interesting connections between wine tasting and some related problems with mathematics. In the next Section we start with two simple problems whose mathematical solutions show at a glance the importance of mathematics also in enology. In Section 3 we discuss an interesting problem known as theFrench paradox. After modeling the problem in a probabilistic way, we provide an analytical solution of it. Then, in Section 4, we move to the various steps of wine tasting finding interesting connections with geometry and analysis. Wine, mathematically speaking, is a dynamical system that has its initial time corresponding to the production of the must, then after the alcoholic fermentation itbecomes a wine and depending on its characteristics we can age it in ‘‘barriques’’ or in bottles. This is mainly what we show in Section 5. Moreover, the ‘‘system-wine’’ depends on many variables, part of them come from the environment,
E-mail address: stefano.demarchi@univr.it 0096-3003/$ - see front matter Ó 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.amc.2007.02.150

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especially soil and climate, and the others from the grapes, that combine in chaotic way. This is the intuitive reason why the wine can be considered a chaotic dynamical system. We conclude by suggesting a particular wine called Chaos, a mix of montelpulciano, syrah and merlot. The wine is produced in the region Marche in Italy andits label is the Mandelbrot set. Chaos was in some sense the inspiration of this paper. 2. Two simple problems Our tour in the subject mathematics and wine starts with two mathematical diversions showing that mathematics can be useful to solve some interesting problems related also to wine. 2.1. The problem of the three barrels Problem 1. A man has three barrels, one completely full with 8hectoliters (hl.) of wine and the other two empty of 5 and 3 hl., respectively (see Fig. 1). The question is: how can the man divide equally the wine with the help only of the empty barrels? The solution runs as follows. At the beginning the barrels contains 8, 0, 0 hl. respectively. If we number them as 1,2,3, then to get the solution we may proceed as follows. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. Pour Pour Pour...