Premise: A senior capstone course¹ in which wine is explored through the lens of a variety of natural science, social science, and humanity disciplines (along with a weekly wine tasting) Topics include…

In memoriam: Robert Germany (1974-2017), Associate Professor of Classics at Haverford College initiated this idea over many evening conversations (with a few glasses of wine). We never got past talking about it with colleagues, but I like to think that we would have pulled it off one day.

There’s clearly a shadow curriculum here, which is teaching students how to know enough to go to business meetings, fundraisers, etc. and schmooze about wine.

Organization and Logistics

Students will be in their final semester of their senior (fourth) year, and presumably of legal drinking age to enroll.
Course meets once a week during a semester (13-15 weeks of instruction) for 3 hours/week. The first 2/3 of each session is a seminar-style discussion; the last third is a structured wine tasting.
Recruit approximately a dozen faculty members, each of whom will prepare readings and give and lead the discussion/tastings.
Deans and Provosts have a hard time budgeting team-taught courses, even worse if you have a dozen instructors. So instead, we’ll expect each instructor to teach a single class pro bono, but with the understanding that they get to take home a case of wine (and assortment from the tastings throught the semester) as compensation.
Midterm: Students will propose and pitch a topical idea keeping in the theme of the course (how wine relates to their major)
Final: Students will prepare readings and discussion materials about wine and some topic related to their major (which can serve as a database for future topics in the course)

Example lecture topics

Classics: Wine drinking in literature and poetry
Philosophy: Wine drinking and drunkenness as themes in Plato (or maybe just deep dive on the Symposium)
Political Science: Ancient Greek Symposia (drinking parties) as the seedbed of democracy
Classics: Reproducing ancient greek drinking games using 3d-printed vessels (could get messy…)
Biochemistry: Fermentation science
Geology: Terroir
Business: The business of the global wine trade
Engineering: Natural cork, synthetic cork, and screw caps—control of oxygen, mechanization, perception of value.
Law: Regional designation laws
Medicine: Health effects of alcohol (is 1 glass of wine per day healthy or a statistical goof)
Pyschology: Anchoring effects on the perception of wine quality, inability to perceive difference between red and white wine, …. review article on wine psychology, basic and applied (2020)
Psychology/Neurology: Addiction
Sociology: Class and wine throughout history; the invention of “wine culture”
Chemistry:
- What does barrel aging do?
- Analytical chemistry: Acid-base and precipitation equilbria of potassium hydrogen tartarate in wine…with a possible lab experiment, or at least some equilibrium calculation
- Organic chemistry: Relating wine aromas by sniffing them to individual molecules and molecule types; basic organic nomenclature
Business: Guest speaker winemaker
Statistics: “Lady tasting tea” problems in statistics, and how to make sense of wine ranking surveys, taste tests, etc.
Literature: So many options to choose from….
- Jack London, John Barleycorn is underappreciated, and captures the appeal and dismay of drinking.
Film: Sideways screening
Environmental studies: Climate change and wine production
History: The invention of champagne (Veuve Cliquot popular biography…why this isn’t a movie yet is beyond me as it is a great story)
Business/Public Policy: A History of the Australian Wine Industry (and its various innovations, marketing, etc.)
Theology: Transubstantiation, the relic of St. Januarius (aka San Gennaro, for whom we have the festival in Manhattan Little Italy
American studies: Prohibition
Islamic studies: Wine in Sufi poetry, Omar Khayyam, etc.
Finance: How do you valuate/price/invest in wine? Draw from case studies in Cifuentes and Charlin, The Worth of Art; last chapter discusses wine pricing (with literature references)
Mathematics: Classic mathematical problems framed using wine-related tasks.
- Kepler’s Nova stereometria doliorum vinariorum, e.g., as treated in Paul Nahin’s When Least is Best:How Mathematicians Discovered Many Clever Ways to Make Things as Small (or as Large) as Possible
- Niccolo Tartaglia’s wine-dilution problem from “General Trattato di Numeri” (1556)
- *I was inspired to add these topics after seeing the example of * determining the pH of a sample of pinot noir with a noisy pH meter in Cory Simon’s recent tutorial on Bayesian inverse problems
(Experimental) Archeology: Understanding ancient Roman vinification by reference to modern georgian winemaking practice—and an excuse to drink some Georgian wine.
Operations Research/Logistics: Wine transportation
Material’s science: The Glass of Wine: The Science, Technology, and Art of Glassware for Transporting and Enjoying Win (book)

Example tasting topics (“labs”)

Basic wine lingo and etiquette (glassware, red/white, dry/sweet, slurp and spit, don’t swallow, … )
Varietal distinctions (a couple sessions)
Old world versus new world winemaking styles
Learning to distinguish cheap wine from decent wine
Get a wine-flaw kit and use it to teach students to identify the different flaws
Illustrate lecture topics as needed (e.g., terroir by comparison tasting )
Demonstrate psychological experiments (most people can’t tell the difference between red and white wine when blinded, evaluate these wines based on price)

Anthony Dutoi suggested that there is so much material here that it could be an entire degree program. Maybe it works best as an adult continuing education program… ↩