Evaluating Red Wine Quality from its Chemical components Using Data Analytics and Modeling.

Wine quality, as Maynard Amerine once said, is easier to detect than define. primarily, wine quality (specifically red wine)is affected by extrinsic factors. It’s usually very difficult to define the quality of red wine basic on it chemical components, and most of the times are only partially successful. Moreover, even if a company defines what they consider high quality, consumers may have different views. In addition, even if the quality of red wine is determined by its chemical components, different companies have different procedures while using the same chemical components to produce the wine, hence it becomes pretty difficult to determine the quality of red wine based on simple chemistry. In this paper, we have tried to predict the quality of red wine based on its chemistry, hence we don't expect 100% accuracy. Our aim is to know to what extent can the quality of red wine be known from its chemical components. Three question is of our interest;
- How do the acidity and quantity of chlorides affect red wine quality
- Which is of high quality? Low alcoholic red wines or high alcoholic red wines?
- How accurate is it to determine the quality of red wine from its chemical components?
Question 1: How do the acidity and quantity of chlorides affect red wine quality.
The number of chlorides and the acidity contents may have conflicting effects on the quality of red wine. To verify this, let’s take a look at the table below.

We notice from the table above that the average acidity of red wines is higher for high-quality wines and lower for low-quality wines. On the other hand, the average chlorides quantity is higher for low-quality wines and lower for high-quality wines. These are conflicting effects and hence, companies are advised to increase the acidity of red wine and reduce the chlorides contents to increase quality.
Question 2: Which is of high quality? Low alcoholic red wines or high alcoholic red wines?
Alcoholic contents of wines are one of the most popular parameters people consider when buying wines, we look at how the alcoholic contents of red wines affect its quality.

As we can see from figure 2 above, low-quality red wines are mostly of low alcoholic contents, while high-quality red wines are mostly of high alcoholic content. In other words, if we consider low alcoholic content red wine, a greater portion of it is of low quality, whereas a high proportion of high alcoholic content red wine is of high quality. This implies that consumers are advised to buy highly alcoholic red-wines to increase the chances of buying a high-quality wine.
Question 3: How accurate is it to determine the quality of red wine from its chemical components?
We mentioned that it’s complicated to determine the quality of red wines only based on its chemical contents.

As we can see from figure 3, and thanks to our prediction, we can deduce that wine most red wines with high alcoholic contents are more likely to be of high quality. since the quantity of alcohol increases with increasing pH, increasing the pH will increase the alcoholic content and hence the red wine quality. Therefore, consumers who have little knowledge about wine qualities should go for high alcoholic wines. This predicted result simply suggests that the higher the alcoholic content of red wine, the higher it’s quality, which is inline we what we got in Question 2. According to our model, this result is 74% accurate.
Conclusion
While the quality of red wine is very important and should be considered both by the companies or consumers, we have however discovered that;
- More acid and fewer chlorides are needed for high-quality red wines.
- A highly alcoholic wine means high quality.
- It’s possible to determine the red quality from its chemical constituents, but only with 74% accuracy.
The GitHub repository for this project can be accessed here
