French nuking wine to determine authenticity

Written by DJ Spiess

Friday, 05 September 2008

French nuclear engineers are using ion beams to determine if rare wines are authentic.

Rare wines attract counterfeiters since some bottles can go for as much as $100,000. As wines continue to rise in value, fraud will always be a problem. Some French nuclear scientists think they have the solution. Blast the bottles with ion beams!

Your wine is expensive, but is it the real deal or were you scammed?

How the ion beam works on wine

No, this isn’t an anarchist solution. At the request of the Antique Wine Company in London, scientists at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Bordeaux have devised a method to use ion beams to determine the age of a bottle. Ion beams particle accelerators can determine the atomic composition of a substance to the parts-per-trillion level.

Bottles made at different points of time or in different regions of the world have different chemical compositions. By matching the bottle’s composition in a database of known bottle compositions, scientists can determine where and when a bottle was made. This will give the wine owner a higher confidence the bottle is authentic.

The technology depends on having known samples to compare to the bottle. The Antique Wine Company claims to already have 120 of Bordeaux’s finest wineries included in their database.

Ion Beams can't solve everything

The owners of the database have pointed out while the wine may be authentic, it may still suck ass. The technique does not guarantee the quality of the wine.

Scammers can always replace the wine inside emptied bottles, but there are other techniques, such as testing for levels of Caesium 137 in the wine itself, to prevent fraud. Testing for Caesium 137, a radioactive isotope, only works for wines during the era of atomic testing.

Other Notes

The Ion Beam Modification and Analysis Laboratory at Univ. of N. Texas houses a particle accelerator capable of analyzing the atomic composition of material to the parts-per-trillion level
By matching the chemical composition of a bottle to known bottles compositions, scientists can determine the bottles origin and age
Other methods are necessary to determine the wine authenticity
Caesium has a half-life of around 30 years

(Source: Discovery.com )

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