Wine, physics teacher and architecture master

You’re going to give a good glass of wine, you’re in one of the most beautiful and richest in high quality vineyards zones of the Earth, the Chianti wine region in Tuscany: what better time for a tasting? Whether it’s in the cool room of the cellar of one of the best winery or in the shade of a pergola of a famous Italian vineyard, a good wine tasting always begins with the observation of the wine in the glass. Your eyes will tell you the color, the transparency of the wine and its clarity. Thanks to the large glass you can twirl this top wine all around the glass, in order to evaluate its fluidity and, above all, let all the liquid touches the air after being closed in the bottle, and thanks to oxygen, give off all its aromas and scents, the major, secondary, deep ones.
Swirling the wine in the glass will also allow you to figure out if the wine you’re about to enjoy is more or less alcoholic, so you also will discover a physical phenomenon studied by numerous scientists in the world: in short, something for connoisseurs!
Then do this: gently twirls this Tuscan wine in the glass, so that it will touch the upper part of the glass, then wait a few seconds. Now raise your glass against the light and you’ll see that although the wine will be dropped, a film of liquid will have been “stuck” on the glass walls..
This fact is due to the tendency of the liquid to remain “attached” to the solid surfaces, in particular to the glass. The wine is mostly a mixture of water and alcohol, and alcohol has the property to evaporate more quickly than water, which allow us to feel the first wine scents.
As the alcohol evaporates, it increases the surface tension of the aqueous portion remained on the glass, which compact itself upwards, in the part that now has no more alcohol, forming a ring on the glass. The density of this ring grows until the force of gravity exceeds the force that keeps the water against the glass; then the water, in some points, begins to fall slowly, as tears, giving rise to the structure that in Italy we call “ad archetti ” “small arches” or “legs”.
The more “arches of the wine” you’ll see, the more alcoholic the wine: here is revealed the secret!
History teaches us that the Etruscans, the ancient inhabitants of these regions, knew the wine by the Greeks as early as the eighth-seventh century BC; History also tells us that the Etruscans invented the arch, an architectural solution destined to change the settlements of men around the world. Who knows if it was the wine to inspire them for the first time?