When the vino doesn't veritas

Timing can be everything with a good wine... though probably not so much for the $10 magnums that young journalists love so much.

However, for those oenophiles that spend thousands procuring just the right collectible bottle from well-established vineyards, the year those grapes were grown is key.

But how can one tell if an unscrupulous winemaker may have snuck drought-starved grapes from 1977 into a bottle and labeled it from soggy 1976?

Apparently atomic bombs can help, according to chemist Graham Jones.

Starting in the 1940s, atomic bomb explosions forced a lot of carbon-14 into the air.
Carbon-14 can be detected through carbon dating, a process that compares the amount of carbon-14 to the amount of normal carbon-12 in a material. This is how scientists can tell how old stuff is on the millions of years scale.

Basically, carbon-14 atoms have two extra neutrons than carbon-12 atoms, and those neutrons degrade over time and scientists measure the degradation.

Plants growing during the period of atomic testing absorbed the bomb-blast carbon-14 as they took carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. But that absorption happened to lesser and lesser degrees as time went on and the bomb-blast carbon-14 degraded back to the normal form of carbon, carbon-12.

So, Jones thought, a wine from 1968 would have a larger amount of carbon-14 isotopes compared to a wine from 1987, but hopefully less than a wine from 1967 if everything was labeled appropriately.

Jones also compared the carbon-14 in wine with that in the atmosphere and found that the trends matched closely.

Now, I probably won't be wasting any of my vino on this process, but it could help fight fraud for higher-end customers. And if any of you uses this technique and finds a fallacious bottle, I will be happy to dispose of the waste for you.