First Steps into Physics in the Winery

TL;DR

This paper presents a practical physics learning path integrated into vocational education for enologists, using real-world laboratory measurements to connect physics concepts with winery tools and practices.

Contribution

It introduces a hands-on physics curriculum tailored for vocational students in enology, linking physics principles directly to winery equipment and practices.

Findings

Students engaged with real measurements and tools.

Positive feedback from students and teachers.

Potential for a two-year physics curriculum in vocational training.

Abstract

Physics is introduced as a basic matter in the curricula of professional schools (i.e. schools for agriculture, electronic or chemistry experts). Students meet physics in the early years of their training and then continue in vocational subjects where many physics' topics can be useful. Rarely, however, the connection between physics and professional matters is quite explicit. Students often feel physics as boring and useless, i.e. very far from their interests. In these schools it is almost always required the physics lab, but it does not always exist. The physics teachers of a local Agricultural Technical Institute asked us to realize a learning path in laboratory for their students, since in their school the physics lab was missing. This institute is the only public school in the Chianti area specializing in Viticulture and Enology, and attending a further year post diploma, allows the achievement of the qualification of Enologist. We report a learning path realized starting from thermal equilibrium to a full understanding of the measures made with the Malligand's ebulliometer, used for determining the alcoholic strength (alcohol concentration by volume) of an alcoholic beverage and water/alcohol solutions in general. The aim was to make interesting measures of physical quantities, calorimetry and state transitions connecting them to the functioning of an instrument that students use in their professional career. The feedback of students and the interests of their teachers convinced us to go further in this way. We intend in the next future to involve teachers of physics and vocational subjects in the design of a physics curriculum spread over two years in which the main physics topics will be introduced to explain the functioning of tools and equipment used, normally, in the winery.