Some mathematics in the wine, part I

The ``leitmotif'' of this paper is essentially the importance of mathematics in all aspects of real life and 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 an 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 almost everything. 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 many ways 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 discuss an interesting problem known as the French paradox. After modeling the problem in a probabilistic way, we provide an analytical solution of it. Wine, mathematically speaking, is a dynamical system that has its initial time corresponding to the production of the must, then after the alcoholic fermentation it becomes a wine and depending on its characteristics we can age it in ``barriques'' or in bottles. This is mainly what we show in Section 3 with emphasis to the mathematics of wine tasting.