Nuclear Testing Helps Identify Fake Vintage Whiskey 366
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 In one recent case, a bottle of 1856 Macallan Rare Reserve was withdrawn from auction at Christies, where it was expected to sell for up to £20,000, after the scientists found it had actually been produced in 1950.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.'"
Re:Taste (Score:3, Interesting)
So... a new status would be started, called the 99% full original verified bottle of vintage whiskey. In fact, unopened full bottles will become the anti-status symbol.
Re:Such a waste (Score:4, Interesting)
A mass spectrometer can operate on a few milligrams of carbon. That means you need perhaps as much as 50 microliters of whiskey, or about 0.0017 oz.
Burning $0.50 worth of whiskey makes sense to me when testing a $20,000 bottle that has a greater than 50% chance of being a fake.
Re:The Same Technique Was Used: +1, Informative (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, the 'real' applications for this technique are much more interesting, possibly even to whisky drinkers:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/02/science/02cell.html [nytimes.com]
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/03/science/03heart.html [nytimes.com]
The nuclear powers helpfully performed a gigantic pulse labelling experiment on the DNA of the entire biosphere back in the 50s, which allows the cell 'birthdays' in various tissues of people born in that era to be determined. The measurements can be calibrated by the C-14 content in tree rings, so you can work out if the cells are (e.g.) as old as the person (certain brain cells) or renewed more recently (like heart muscle).
Re:Taste (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Taste (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Re:Business Opportunity...? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:How old is old enough? (Score:3, Interesting)
Also note that many single-malt distilleries are now selling their stock to other labels, and are intentionally "blending" it by adding a trivial amount of some other stock for no reason other than to prevent labeling of the end product as single-malt -- the perception of the single-malt label is much more valuable than any pragmatic product difference.
Re:creationists (Score:3, Interesting)
This is not technically "carbon dating", it's detecting the presence of a newer isotope that wasn't present in any quantities prior to a certain date.
Nice try, but they're checking for Carbon-14, discovered five years before the first nuclear bomb was detonated and used for "carbon dating" materials up to about 60,000 years old. 14C is, in fact, the reason it's called "carbon dating".
It tastes like what you imagine it to taste (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Business Opportunity...? (Score:3, Interesting)
But for anyone thinking it could somehow be filtered, that's simply not possible. All the alcohol and the stuff that gives it flavor are organic molecules with carbon making the backbone. There isn't a way to go in and find which are the carbon-14 atoms and selectively replacing them with carbon-12.
The technique used is guaranteed to be mass spectroscopy which destroys the sample because it has to be atomized and ionized. All the atoms basically get weighed at the same time so you don't know which atom came from where. You just know the isotope ratios.
There are mass spec techniques that would allow finding where a particular atom would be located, but I don't believe it would work if you have millions of molecules with random substitutions which is probably the case.
Carbon-14 and fossil fuels (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Taste (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Taste (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Shocking. (Score:1, Interesting)
But it may not be a statistical sample. They're probably going to the expense of testing only the ones that are both expensive and suspicious for other reasons.
There are ways that this isotopic technique could be foiled, theoretically. It wouldn't be easy to set up correctly, but what it would take is a combination of plants grown in the right C-14-depleted atmosphere (this is possible by generating CO2 from "old" carbon obtained from burning fossil fuels and piping it into a greenhouse), and getting water not derived from recent atmospheric sources (e.g., deeper groundwater that hasn't yet been contaminated by surface waters replenishing the aquifer, or old glacial ice). Then you'd have to go through the fermentation and distillation process with similar precautions. The goal would be to avoid using any water/carbon/nutrients from post-1950 time periods -- difficult and probably not worth the expense, but I think it would be technically possible, especially if they are only screening for certain isotopes.
Perhaps I could legitimately advertise it as "radiation-reduced whiskey", and sell it at a premium? :-)
Re:How old is old enough? (Score:0, Interesting)
Oxygen exposure depends on how it is bottled. Corks let in minute amounts of oxygen over time. True, a 14 year scotch is a lot different than a 10 year scotch that was bottled 4 years ago. But even with modern air tight capping systems, it is not at all clear what happens in the bottle over time. My home brewed beers certainly age and develop after bottling. Wines are frequently bottle aged for years. To say that no aging happens in the bottle is flippant at best.
Care Package (Score:4, Interesting)
As a gift for newgrouping a Usenet group (alt.archery.traditional, if I remember correctly), I was once sent a scotch whisky care package. In it were twelve baby food jars that were numbered but otherwise not labeled. Only after I had sampled each and given my opinion was I told what each one was. I do not know that you have twelve varieties at your disposal, but this was an enlightening experience for me and could possibly be for some of your friends as well.
Mal-2
Re:Anything "high end" is generally a rip off (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Taste (Score:2, Interesting)
It should be possible. Other comments here (http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1221551&cid=27821391) have indicated that the bottle should "off-gass", and those gases could be collected for analysis. Sensitivity might be a concern, since the best gas-sampling mass spectrometers aren't usually the best at measuring isotope ratios, which is required for the analysis.