Jon, my former virtual landlord, sent me this link on a subject I’ve blogged about before: detecting fakery and fraud in the fine and vintage wine market:
Up to 5% of fine wines are not from the year the label indicates, according to Australian researchers who have carbon dated some top dollar wines.
The team of researchers think “vintage fraud” is widespread, and have come up with a test that uses radioactive carbon isotopes left in the atmosphere by atomic bomb tests last century and a method used to date prehistoric objects to determine what year a wine comes from — its vintage.
[. . .]
“The problem goes beyond ordinary consumers being overcharged for a bottle of expensive wine from a famous winery with a great year listed on the label, that isn’t the right vintage year,” Jones said.
“Connoisseurs collect vintage wines and prices have soared with ‘investment wines’ selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars a case at auction,” he said.
I read Benjamin Wallace’s The Billionaire’s Vinegar which was rather an eye-opener about both the rare wine trade and the potential for fraud in that market (posts here and here). It’s nice to see that technology is coming to the rescue in cases where this kind of fraud is suspected.
