Can you concentrate alcohol by evaporating the aqueous solution at room temp and collecting on a cold surface? I have a bowl containing cheap wine and an immersible fish tank heater. The heater warms the wine to 30 deg C. The bowl is located in a large closed bucket, where it sits on a support. The bucket is sited out of doors in winter when the air temperature is Ca 1 deg C. Evaporation occurs and the vapour condenses on the inner surface of the bucket. Droplets of condensate run down and form a pool of liquid on the floor of the bucket.

Question: what can be predicted about the composition of the condensate?

Question #2 What effect is achieved by raising or lowering the temperature of the wine on the composition of the condensate. In plain language what temperature of the wine will give me the highest concentration of alcohol in the condensate? How can the strength of the alcohol be measured?

Question #3 What is the effect of different air temperatures outside of the bucket (on the composition of the condensate)?

Question #4 Why is this method not commonly used to concentrate alcohol?
Yes you can do that, this technique is called 'distillation' (it requires a minimum difference of 10 degrees celsius to seperate two liquids with different boiling points, for efficiency), I don't know what temeperature the fish tank heater runs at, but you should know that ethanol i,e. what you are trying to separate evaporates at 37 degrees celsius same as normal body temperature, and the temperature of the cooling plate should be &lt; 27 degrees for efficiency

Edit -
yes, exactly the boiling point of ethanol is 78.3 degrees but ethanol is highly volatile and evaporates very fast at 37 degrees (without taking much water vapour with it) as far as my observation is concerned(with room temperature around, 1 atm pressure). the values I mentioned are the optimal conditions with experimental background. your goal as I can percieve is to avoid as much water as possible, if you take the condenser temperature to below 10 degrees the water vapour present in air will also start to condense at a good rate