Experiments
TopPurpose & Overview
It must be a familiar sight for those who have left a wine glass with a bit of wine standing overnight: wine crystals. Those are the little grains at the bottom of you glass, when the wine has dried up overnight. Its also possible to find them already in the wine itself, they are usually called 'wine diamonds' by the connoisseur. the question is ofcourse, what are these 'diamonds'? This experiment will show you that.
To find out what kind of juwels there are in wine, the following has to be done:
- Process
- Evaporating the water from the wine and start the crystallization.
- Collect the crystals.
- Purify the crystals.
- Analyse the crystals.
- Make a big 'diamond'.
What You Need
- Chemicals
- Wine (red or white)
- Equipment
- (coffee)filters
- funnel
- (glass) beakers
- pair of tweezers or a needle
Theory
Wine contains a lot of chemicals that can form crystals and are present in a big enough ammount. Those chemicals are: sugar, vitamin c, tartaric acid, lactic acid, malic acid, citric acid, acetic acid, sorbic acid en succinic acid.
TopProcedure
- Step 1
- Fill a beaker with wine and place it somewhere warm and dry. It is also possible to place it in a heated oven, as long as the liquid doesn't boil or burn. The wine can start molding at some point, if that happens, filtrate it and continue the evaporation of water from the wine.
- Eventually small white dots can be seen at the bottom of the beaker, these are the crystals.
- Step 2
- Use a pair of tweezers or a needle to remove the crystals from the wine residue.
- If you want to view the crystals underneath a microscope you can place them on a slide, otherwise you can collect them in a small container until you have enough crystals.
- If you can't get all of the crystals out of the beaker, you can add some water or wine to give the crystals a chance to become bigger.
- Step 3
- Dissolve the crystals in water. Using warm water will dissolve them faster, but it can still take a while until they are all dissolved. If they stop dissolving, add some more water for the solution has then become saturated.
- Filter deze oplossing minimaal 1 keer om alle wijnresten te verwijderen die aan de kristallen vast zaten.
- Laat deze oplossing indampen om zuivere kristallen te verkrijgen.
- Step 4
- Door te kijken naar de vorm en eigenschappen van de kristallen kunnen we zeggen met wat voor stof (of stoffen) we te maken hebben. Het makkelijkste te gebruiken hiervoor is een microscoop, maar een vergrootglas kan al voldoende zijn wanneer de kristallen groot genoeg zijn.
- Step 5
- Het maken van een groot kristal is lastig, omdat er in totaal weinig massa is om de kristallen van te maken. Het is dus nodig om de materialen of te kopen, of heel veel wijn in te dampen.
Results
To be continued...
TopConclusion
To be continued...
TopExtra
To be continued...
TopSources
[1] Wikipedia
[2] Specimen from my personal collection, photo taken by me.
