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Atomic discovery to prevent wine forgery
Scientists searching for a way to spot cheap wines being passed off as fine vintages have developed a method of carbon-dating wine to prevent forgery.
The method involves measuring the trace amounts of carbon released into the atmosphere during atomic bomb testing in the 1960s that have been absorbed by vines and into the wine.
The technique allows scientists to pinpoint exactly which year the wine was made, with the levels of carbon in the atmosphere having gradually reduced year-on-year since testing ended.
Speaking at the American Chemical Society meeting in San Francisco, Dr Graham Jones from the University of Adelaide, Australia, said that misrepresenting the vintage is a never-ending problem for collectors, with up to 5% of wines sold globally thought to be fake.
He said: “The problem goes beyond ordinary consumers being overcharged for a bottle of expensive wine of a famous winery with a great year listed on the label.
“Connoisseurs collect vintage wines and prices have soared with ‘investment wines’ selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars a case at auction.”
Dr Jones and his team of researchers discovered that radioactive carbon dioxide in the atmosphere after atomic bomb tests was absorbed by grapes.
The age of a wine can be accurately measured by comparing the amount of carbon-14, which was released by bomb testing in the 1940s to 1960s, to the amount of carbon-12.
Dr Jones said: “Until the late 1940s all carbon-14 in the Earth’s biosphere was produced by the interaction between cosmic rays and nitrogen in the upper atmosphere.
“This changed in the late 1940s up to 1963 when atmospheric atomic explosions significantly increased the mount of C-14 in the atmosphere.
“When the tests stopped in 1963 a clock was set ticking – that of the dilution of this ‘bomb-pulse’ C-14 by CO2 formed by the burning of fossil fuels.”
In testing, the technique was found to be accurate to within one year when applied to 20 Australian red wines made between 1958 and 1997.
Alan Lodge, 24.03.2010