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Carbon-14 Dating Reveals 5% of Vintage Wines May Be Frauds
Carbon dating isn't used only for such academic pursuits as trying to determine the age of the Shroud of Turin, or figure out how old some rocks are. An anonymous reader writes "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."
There is a trick that can be used to date things from the 2nd half of the 20th century. Nuclear bomb testing caused a spike in atmospheric C14, which is rapidly decreasing as it equilibrates with the oceans (among other things). The actual radioactive decay is insignificant on this timescale, and so we can get a pretty good idea if the grapes used to make the wine were plucked after nuclear testing began, and if so what year they were harvested. This technique has also been used in biology to date the "birth" of cells in human tissues.
here's the biology reference: http://www.pnas.org/content/103/33/12564.long
these guys pioneered the tech for use in biology, but then it was popularly applied to wines.
According to the study, wine experts have estimated that up to 5% of fine wines sold today are not all they are cracked up to be on the label or in the price tag
The carbon dating didn't find 5% of wines are frauds. A bunch of "wine experts" they talked to said it.
Also, it's not based off the age of the carbon in the wine; it's based off the percentage of radioactive carbon from nuclear tests. Unless they have a precise idea of exactly how much radioactive carbon ended up where after each test, the whole thing is a load of crap.
Please help metamoderate.
No, he's right that it's 14C. Tritium gets incorporated into water, so it gets spread around very quickly and regularly. It also has a relatively short half life (~12 years). 14C released in nuclear testing mostly winds up as CO2, which gets pulled out of the air fast enough to serve as a useful marker but not so fast that it isn't still useful decades after the end of atmospheric testing.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
I'm going to have to try this with beer. For science, of course.
I'm from Argentina. We produce some of the finest wines in the world, specially in Mendoza.
t,
Here, a cheap, average wine that most people drink at home with dinner retails at ~$9 (That is, 9 pesos, or 2.3 Dollars.)
A relatively good wine retails ~$20 (5.2 dollars). At $150 (39 dollars), you can get one of the finest wines you'll ever taste.
The funny thing is, while traveling to the USA, I've recognized bottles that Retail here for ~$35 (9 dollars), with tags of 250 dollars!
So, leaving that aside, yes, you can definitely tell the difference, but it's not all about money. You can definitely tell the difference between any two wines. But, with wine, price is not always = quality. I've tested $200 wines that I didn't like (like the Lamadrid Gran Reserva Malbec) , and $20 (5 dollars) wines that I loved (Like Benjamin Nieto Cabernet Sauvignon)
So, money plays a big role, but there's not a clear relationship between price and quality. It's more of a threshold ... you won't find really good wines very cheap. But above a certain price, there are good and bad wines at a very ample price range
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
He mentioned that the last time the French tested a nuke in the pacific (?)
Why the question mark there? FYI, France is notorious for its love of nukes.
Circumcision is child abuse.
There are plenty of rocks that contain carbon. Good examples include limestone, marble, coal, and oil shale. The problem isn't lack of carbon. The problem is that the half life of 14C is very short compared to the age of most rocks, so there isn't enough radiocarbon left to date.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
We have wine nearly every day. There's no need to spend more than $100 and there's plenty of wines under $60. I'm talking wine store not restaurant. The number of wines that I've had over $200 that I've went wow this is amazing is pretty much zero. There were a handful of wines in the $100-$200 and those wines are at that price because they got high ratings which drove them up. Before that they were sub $100. I've spoken to numerous winemakers and quite a number of them say we have to have a >$100 wine because so and so has one and people that know nearly nothing about wine but have a lot of money will buy just on price, that being expensive. Seek out the little brothers of wines like Grange which are considerably less in cost. The same holds true for some of the high end Spanish wines and some of the Italian wines. If the year is a good one for 20-40% of the flagship wine you get a really great bottle and that wine is being made from some of the same grapes in the high end wine. For $15-$30 there's probably a thousand good/very good wines. Yes, there are some really great finds for even less than that and even in a box. For parties, Powers Cabernet from Washington State is quite good. $6 bottle in a box, $13 in glass. Same wine. It boils down to one thing drink what you like regardless of cost but do try others when given the chance because you might be surprised on what you're missing. Go to wine tastings where you can taste the overpriced but more importantly try wines in the price range which you will spend when buying. It really irks me when people go from table to table and just taste the 1 or 2 most expensive wines at a table of 12-20.
GP isn't completely wrong though. Tritiated thymidine was commonly used to label cells which were actively taking up DNA and were therefore proliferating. BrdU is more commonly used today. Both are somewhat more convenient than utilizing nuclear bomb tests.
I find the article very interesting given the history of adult neurogenesis. Pasko Rakic, who communicated the paper, was initially very skeptical of those results:
At the time, the new technique of labelling a cell with thymidine to determine the birth date of neurons was used in newborns, since adult animals were not thought to create new neurons. But Altman decided to try the technique with adults. He published several papers in the most reputable scientific journals, claiming that new neurons are formed in the brains of adult rats, cats, and guinea pigs–a discovery that Nottebohm later made with canaries. Because the techniques Altman used were primitive, however, they were open to reasonable doubt. It was a classic example of a discovery made ahead of its time. At first, Altman was ignored, then he was ridiculed, and finally, after failing to receive tenure at M.I.T., he moved to Purdue. With no recognition, he was quickly forgotten. The field almost dried up. A decade later, Michael Kaplan, a researcher at Boston University and later at the University of New Mexico, used an electron microscope to supply more compelling evidence that several parts of the adult brain, including the cortex, also produced neurons. He, too, met resistance from researchers who did not find his work convincing. ("Those may look like neurons in New Mexico,'' Kaplan remembers Rakic saying at the time. "But they don't in New Haven.") Kaplan had published his findings in important journals and even suggested a novel way to test the phenomenon in humans, but he, too, was ignored, and he left the field.
source
Rakic has admitted he was wrong, and I think his criticisms weren't unfounded. The immunohistochemistry demonstrating they are real neurons, for one thing, adresses some of the major concerns he had with the previous studies. Still, it's interesting: the "novel way" to test it in humans was look at brain sections of people who had been treated for cancer with BrdU, proposed decades ago, at the time it was considered too difficult. The study you cited does that and also uses nuclear tests to further illustrate the point.
Mod parent up. The exact same thing is noticeable in France.
I love cooking with wine in quite a few different dishes and styles. I always used the cheapo wines I could find, and in southern France (as in, 30 miles from the Spanish border), a cheap wine is something you get between 1 EUR per 750ml bottle and 3-4 EUR per 5 litre box.
When I moved to the UK, the cheapest I could find began at 6-7 GBP. In France, most people drink (or should I say, absorb) 3 EUR bottles. They'll go for a 12 EUR bottle when they're feeling fancy. You rarely see people going for the 30+ EUR bottles, unless it's a dining party and you have to bring a gift.
The first time I tasted a 100+ GBP was in London. And yeah, sure, it was nice to have a penguin decant it and use a spotless napkin to absorb the couple of drops that would otherwise have hit the tablecloth, but for all intents and purposes, the 12 EUR wine will do just fine.
That being said, I agree with grandparent though. Going for a 4 digit wine is a once in a lifetime experience that people who can afford it should definitely pay up for. Make sure to bring a wine-knowledgeable friend with you that night too, that way if it tastes like crap and you don't know if you ought to start shouting, your mate will make that decision for you.
There are alternate radiocarbon techniques that are much more accurate. Nuclear weapons testing resulted in a big spike in atmospheric carbon-14 levels globally, which is dropping rapidly since the test ban treaty. Biologists have been using these techniques for determining cell ages for a couple years.
More info can be found here
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Or, since you HAVE read /. for a while, you could read the article. Which describes the measurement of increased C14 levels due to atmospheric fallout after detonation of nuclear weapons, and their subsequent reduction (dilution) due to fossil fuel burning, which in their testing was enough to narrow down to a specific year.
The Australian researcher quoted in the story was co-author of a paper involving forensic use of C-14 dating of wines published in 2004:
U. Zoppi, Z. Skopec, J. Skopec, G. Jones, D. Fink, Q. Hua, G. Jacobsen, C. Tuniz, A. Williams, Forensic applications of 14C bomb-pulse dating, Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research Section B: Beam Interactions with Materials and Atoms, Volumes 223-224, Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Accelerator Mass Spectrometry, August 2004, Pages 770-775, ISSN 0168-583X, DOI: 10.1016/j.nimb.2004.04.143.
(http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6TJN-4CDWMNK-F/2/b2a003d44396872bd06d5c80443167cd)
and I'm nearly certain I saw published research in the 1990s using C-14 dating to establish wine adulteration, but as it's 3:40 in the morning insomniac me is not going to run down the reference