The Age of Wine
A wine brewer poses a mathematician the following challenge. He says, "I want you to guess the age of these three bottles of wine with the following information:"
- The product of their ages is 72.
- The sum of the ages is the number of the house across the street.
After some deliberation, the mathematician says, "It is impossible to determine the answer". In response, the wine brewer says, "The oldest wine is a Chianti Classico". The mathematician proudly announces: "I know the answer".
What is the age of the three wines?
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1 solution
The first step to solving this problem is starting with the information you can determine without background information, and that is that the product of the bottles of wine is 72. There are twelve combinations of three numbers (regardless of order) that can multiply to get 72:
The next clue states that "The sum of the ages is the number of the house across the street. Obviously, we cannot know the number of the house across the street. However, the important note is that the mathematician claims that this scenario doesn't reveal an answer. If you take the sum of the combinations, only two of them have the same total sum, which is the number of the house across the street: 14 (2+6+6 = 3+3+8 = 14). The last clue states that "The oldest bottle is a Chianti Classico". It's not the type of wine that matters, but the fact that the clue reveals that there is only a single oldest wine. This rules out the other option, leaving the answer: 3, 3 and 8.