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Nuclear Testing Helps Identify Fake Vintage Whiskey
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 In one recent case, a bottle of 1856 Macallan Rare Reserve was withdrawn from auction at Christies, where it was expected to sell for up to £20,000, after the scientists found it had actually been produced in 1950.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.'"
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.
Would you be able to live with yourself though? Constantly lying to people and ripping them off, it would really wear on a person with a conscience.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Respectfully, B.S.
There is a sharp curve of diminishing returns once you cross the $40 mark in whisk(e)y. However, it doesn't take long to learn
the difference between an Islay and a Highland, or to understand the difference between a younger or older scotch, or to understand that some expressions
of whisky do better with longer casking and some are better when bottled at a younger age.
Plenty is attributable to marketing - I'll take a $50 Lagavulin 16 over a $200 blended Blue Label any day of the week, twice on Sundays, and infinitely more on
a mythical desert island. Those who are looking to impress coworkers, bosses, and clients may tell a different story, but it does not take long to develop a basic palate
when it comes to whisky, nor does it require a ton of cash. Distinguishing between a chipped and truly aged scotch is trickier, but still doable.
Frankly, in the end, it is about taste: if you can make a four year old taste like a 20 year old whiskey cheaply through chipping and good
distilled water (whisky weakens throughout the barreling process as the "angels' share" evaporates), I'll be happy to drink it. To wit, I avoid blends in
general, but a $15 fifth of blended White Horse is a hell of a deal and sits near a Macallan, Oban, Ardbeg, Balvenie 21, and a Lagavulin and a Laphroaig 15 (not to
mention some ryes and borboun) on my shelf.
And yes, I'm, might be fooled between the Lagavulin and Laphroig, but I doubt it when it comes to the others.
I think one has to remember that not everyone who drinks or enjoys alcohol partakes in the American binge drinking culture - including many Americans. /.ers in the sense of experimentation and applied science.
In fact, I have found some American tastes to be far more diverse than other cultures (to which I have been exposed) in fostering mixing, homebrewing,
and modern bootlegging traditions - all of which should be somewhat enticing to
Leben Sie jetzt die Fragen.
It tastes like whatever you convince yourself that it should taste like.
Probably a better example would be a better documented breed of self-deluded puppies: the kind of audiophiles who'd buy an audiophile-grade ethernet (i.e., digital!) cable for $500 and swear that they hear whatever difference you tell them they should hear, when they play MP3's (again: digital!) over that network. As if a 1 weren't just as much a 1 or a 0 as much a 0 over it. But no, if you tell them they should hear a fuller and richer bass, they'll actually hear it.
There are wooden volume knobs sold out there as doing this or that magic for the music, and (the right kind of) people will actually hear that magic. Even though that volume knob isn't even part of the signal chain at all. It's just a wooden disc on the outside. The potentiometer (variable resistor) that actually controls the volume is something else on the same shaft. But they'll swear they hear the difference.
Someone on another forum at one time actually heard the difference between MP3's played off different brands of hard drives. Once it got into his head that a magnetic disc is really coated in a magnetic layer like a cassette, and that there was this different between sound reproduction between different cassette coatings (e.g., iron versus chrome), he actually started hearing that one hard drive gives better bass and another gives better trebble. And he can hear that difference.
So basically my bet is that it works just the same with anything. Sound, image, taste (since we're at whiskey), or whatever you wish. If the Grimm Brothers' "The Emperor's New Clothes" had happened IRL, people would have actually seen whatever clothes they got it into their head that really smart and superior people see. And no amount of children screaming "the emperor is naked" would change that. And even if you got the emperor and his guards out of the equation, if a hundred years later the country were a republic and the non-existent clothes were in an (empty) glass box at a museum, some people would still go and congratulate each other for being so superior as to see the fabulous clothes in the box.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Very simple: grow your grain with the CO2 emitted by burning fossil fuels. Oil or coal that are millions of years old have very little C-14.
You are correct. This is a useless te.
Opening the bottle destroys the value.
Sort of like Schrodinger's Cat, the mere act of testing destroys the test subject.
An open bottle can never be presumed to be real, and a still sealed one is equally suspect.
Call me back when they can do this right thru th bottle.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Sigh, there were some typos there. I wish I could attribute them to scotch, but I can't.
I can, however, explain chipping, making a reply to my own post a little more legitimate. One way to make a younger whiskey (I'm not going to worry about the 'e' from here on) taste or appear older is to put roasted wood chips in the cask. Additionally, agitation may be used. Flavor and color is imparted by the cask over time and surface area (a terrible cheat is to introduce caramel into a casking, a practice which can disqualify the product from being marketed as scotch or whiskey in some areas). These tricks are more common in younger American distilleries, however lots of bad distilleries pull this nonsense.
Now, younger whiskey will always taste "sharper" and less finished than it's older counterpart. It is possible to control this by mixing a younger whiskey with distilled water (for a single or vatted malt) or with older or calmer whiskies (for vatted or blended whiskies). Even so, there is a difference in taste between a whiskey that has matured and one whose alcohol content has been mitigated. Consumers can actually try this on their own, without a trip to a distillery: purchase a younger cask strength whisky (usually >55% ABV) and an older finished expression from the same distillery. Add distilled water until the ABV is the same level. Taste.
Leben Sie jetzt die Fragen.
It is better for society if there isn't $90,000 worth of parts and labor in an S-Class Mercedes. The whole point of luxury items is to take a rich person's money and put it back into circulation, in the process reducing the concentration of power that his bankroll represents. The only question is, how much wealth will be consumed in the process?
Selling him a $80,000 Rolex burns about $4,000 in actual wealth to liberate the $80,000. That's efficient.
Him hiring a butler for $80,000 a year burns about $40,000 in actual wealth -- this is the wealth the butler could've created elsewhere, rather than scurrying around making the rich guy feel special. That's not efficient.
So, never criticize super-expensive trinkets; they are far far better for society's total net wealth than servants.
FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE