  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.
