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Nuclear Testing Helps Identify Fake Vintage Whiskey

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the nuclear-booze-coozie dept.

Hugh Pickens writes "Industry experts claim the market for vintage whiskey has been flooded with fakes that purport to be several hundred years old but instead contain worthless spirit made just a few years ago. Now researchers at the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit have developed a method that can pinpoint the date a whiskey was made by detecting traces of radioactive particles created by nuclear bomb tests in the 1950s. '"It is easy to tell if whiskey is fake as if it has been produced since the middle of the twentieth century, it has a very distinctive signature," says Dr. Tom Higham, deputy director of the facility. Nuclear bomb testing in the 1950s saw levels of carbon-14 in the atmosphere rise around the world so the amount of isotope absorbed by living organisms since this time has been artificially elevated. Whiskey extracted from antique bottles is sent to the laboratory where scientists burn the liquid and bombard the resulting gas with electrically charged particles so they can measure the carbon-14 in the sample. In one recent case, a bottle of 1856 Macallan Rare Reserve was withdrawn from auction at Christies, where it was expected to sell for up to £20,000, after the scientists found it had actually been produced in 1950. "So far there have probably been more fakes among the samples we've tested than real examples of old whiskey," says Higham.'"

6 of 366 comments (clear)

  1. Taste by pilsner.urquell · · Score: 5, Insightful

    What? They can't tell the difference by tasting it?

    1. Re:Taste by OpenSourced · · Score: 5, Insightful

      What? They can't tell the difference by tasting it?

      I suppose they can, but telling the difference is not the same as proving it. You need some kind of proof to accuse somebody of making fakes, not just its subjective taste.

      --
      Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
    2. Re:Taste by Burning1 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      If you spend 20,000 pounds on a bottle of whiskey, you're going to taste the difference, even if there isn't one. Belief can have as much an impact on perception as reality.

      Penn & Teller did a great experiment in an episode of their show, Bullshit. In one episode, they serve hose water in fancy bottles with fantastic stump lines about how great and rare each different bottle of hose water is. Most of the diners tasted a difference between the various bottles of hose water.

      In another, they had a prop design guy use (extremely) cheap ingredients to create tantalizing foods. The waiter would convince diners that stale bread was an exotic french import, receiving rave reviews in the process.

      Advertising is all about perception, and a lot of our consumer economy is based on it. My girlfriend works for a high end cosmetics chain... You wouldn't believe what a rip off that stuff can be.

      It makes me wish I was in the cosmetics business.

  2. Shocking. by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I never would have expected fakes to outnumber genuine articles in a status driven market with poor verification.

  3. Business Opportunity...? by sampson7 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It sounds like "real" old whiskies are set to see a dramatic increase in price. Imagine if a rare collectible that fetched thousands of dollars at auction were about to become 50 or even 80 percent rarer. The intersection of the good old supply and demand curve sounds like it's about to jump....

    But really, who needs anything better than a 16 y.o. Lagavulin, anyway? F'ing Snobs.

  4. Re:I was bitten by a radioactive whiskey by Achromatic1978 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I was going to say "I think most of us were capable of interpolating that without your assistance", but your current Insightful mod might indicate otherwise. Kinda sad, really ...