Wine and Physics

Physics and wine are not often in the same blog. This is an exception. When I go on vacation, I try to bring a book that will tax my mind. I am vacationing this week and my book is “The Black Hole Wars, or how my battle with Stephen Hawking made the world safe for Quantum Mechanics.” It was written by Leonard Susskind.

One of the building blocks of Quantum Mechanics is the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. The gist of the principle is that by observing something you change it. So, even though you think you have devised an experiment that covers all the variables, you can never be sure of the outcome. Everything must be rated in probability not definitive results.

Now what does this have to do with wine? As I was studying this Principal, I thought of wine evaluation. I wish I could tell you I was pondering a fine wine when it came to me, but I was drinking a Daiquiri by a pool. Besides that incongruity, I thought of how often, someone has told me what I should think about a certain wine. I may say the color is purple and another may correct me and say “no it is garnet”. We in the wine business make it a habit of judging wine and telling you what to think. This gets in the way of peoples enjoyment of wine.

By applying Quantum Mechanics and the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, we can say that a wine is not necessarily what the expert says it is. Another quirk of Quantum Mechanics is that things can be in two states at the same time, such as light i.e. waves and photons. So you both can be right at the same time.

So, the next time someone tells you are wrong about a wine, tell them to bone up on their Quantum Mechanics