Experiment to determine the ethanol content of wine

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Experiment to Determine Ethanol Content of Wine

The purpose of this experiment is to determine the ethanol content of each of the wines and compare the value determined to the value quoted on the label. These results can then be used to conclude which region is more accurate in quoting the value of the ethanol content of the wine.

This experiment takes advantage of the fact that ethanol is less dense than water in solution. The density of ethanol at 20°C is 0.789 g/cm3 while the density of water at the same temperature is 0.998 g/cm3. It then follows that different solutions of ethanol and water will have different densities also, because the relative volume of ethanol increases and water decreases so the density of higher percentage ethanol solutions will be less than the density of lower percentage ethanol solutions. This occurs because water molecules are much smaller than ethanol molecule, meaning more water molecules can "pack" into a smaller volume than ethanol molecules, meaning there is more mass per unit volume of water compared to ethanol, meaning it has a higher density.

In this experiment, solutions of ethanol in water were made up, going