Nuclear Physicists Fight Wine Fraud

Sept. 3, 2008 -- Nuclear scientists in France have unveiled a 21st century tool for unmasking counterfeit vintage wines, by zapping them with ion beams from a particle accelerator.

The beams, which are directed at the glass, not the wine, can distinguish how old the bottles are and where they might originate.

"The chemical composition of glass used to make bottles changed over time and was different from place to place," says Herve Guegan, a researcher at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Bordeaux.

"We compare the suspect bottles with those that we know come from the chateaux."

The Antique Wine Company in London, which handles more than 10,000 bottles of rare wines every year for thousands of customers around the world, asked Guegan's center to develop the fraud-busting technology.

"We sell bottles every day for between 2,000 and 10,000 dollars," said the company's managing director, Stephen Williams. He added that an exceptional grand cru can fetch up to $100,000.

At these prices, "counterfeiting is something we have to be very diligent about," he said.

France's most prestigious Burgundy and Bordeaux chateaux are notoriously reluctant to discuss fraud or its prevalence, but wine experts say it is a growing problem.

In a recent case, American collector William Koch sued a German wine dealer, claiming four bottles -- allegedly belonging to president Thomas Jefferson -- he had purchased for $500,000 were fake. The case has yet to be settled.