Carbon-14 Dating Reveals 5% of Vintage Wines May Be Frauds 336
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."
Re:Old Enough? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Old Enough? (Score:5, Informative)
here's the biology reference: http://www.pnas.org/content/103/33/12564.long [pnas.org]
these guys pioneered the tech for use in biology, but then it was popularly applied to wines.
Bad headline, hollow story (Score:2, Informative)
From TFA:
The researchers think carbon-dating fine wines could help nip in the bud the growing practice of vintage fraud.
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.
Nothing about the researchers estimating that 5%: that's made up by the "wine experts". (They should know.)
misleading summary (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Old Enough? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Excellent work. (Score:2, Informative)
I'm going to have to try this with beer. For science, of course.
Re:Let me take a pro-expensive wine position (Score:5, Informative)
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
Re:misleading summary (Score:1, Informative)
For the study to see if a wine's vintage can be carbon-dated, much in the same way that fossils are, the researchers measured the carbon-14 levels in the fermented sugars that give wine its alcohol content, in 20 Australian red wines from vintages from 1958 to 1997.
They then compared the measurements to radioactivity levels of known atmospheric samples, and found they were able to reliably determine the vintage of wines to within the vintage year.test, the whole thing is a load of crap.
Re:carbon dating problems (Score:3, Informative)
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. [wikipedia.org]
Re:Dammit (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Let me take a pro-expensive wine position (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Re:Old Enough? (Score:3, Informative)
GP isn't completely wrong though. Tritiated thymidine [wikipedia.org] 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 [michaelspecter.com]
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.
Re:Let me take a pro-expensive wine position (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Carbon dating is not accurate by century let al (Score:5, Informative)
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 [pnas.org]
Re:Carbon dating is not accurate by century let al (Score:5, Informative)
Re:No One Would Notice (Score:1, Informative)
I've had a $400 wine before (obtained at a decent price and then aged). The difference between a decent $20-$40 wine and a $400 one is minimal relative to the price.
I doubt anyone without a really refined palate would be able to notice. And even if you did, you would probably chalk it up to poor storage or oxidation or something.
First let me say I like wine, but I'm not a snob about it. A lot of the whole debate is a matter of various misunderstandings about wine.
First of all there really are two types of wines (in general). You have "normal" wine and then you have mass-produced wine. For beer-drinkers, it's like comparing a small microbrewery to a big company like Anheiser-Busch. The small brewery may or may not be very consistent between batches, but the big boys' are almost always identical.
So to start with, if we're talking about mass-produced wine then price is very rarely relevant to taste or quality.
The perception of "expensive = better" actually comes from traditionally made wines, which are actually pretty small operations.
The flavor varies from season to season depending on the weather, grow time, etc. and so you can get some pretty widely ranging results.
Good years will cost more than bad years, for a couple reasons. The most obvious one being that the winery will price the poor years cheaply, or even in some cases sell them under a different brand. The other reason being that when you're talking about a pretty limited vintage, the good stuff gets drank up pretty fast (or laid down in private cellars) and then it's just not around to buy in the first place.
So you get someone who isn't paying attention to the specifics of wine, who hears that brand XYZ is a really really good wine, so they go out and buy a bottle and it sucks. But what they don't realize is they bought a crap vintage year which has been marked up by the retailer due to the brand name, because they know that a lot of suckers with no taste will pay for it just to be snobs. So they say "Huh, that expensive wine isn't good, therefore expense has no relation to taste" instead of realizing they just had someone sell them a turd with a gold ribbon on it.
Does more expensive mean better taste? Well not always of course, but if you know what you're buying then as a general rule, it certainly CAN be an indicator.
Oh, and for really, really good wine... the reason why it's so expensive is that you just can't buy it. Period. There might only have been a couple hundred bottles of that vintage laid down, or even as few as a few dozen, and the only way you'll ever get to drink it is if you own, or know personally the owners of the vineyard itself... or happen to have enough money to pick up a few bottles at a private auction.
There is one additional factor for expensive wines, and that is how well they age. A very good wine will stay good a very long time if bottled properly... they can last for literally hundreds of years. Crap wines or shoddy botteling practices will result in a bottle of very expensive vinegar, however. So what happened was that over time people figured out not only which vineyards, but which year, would be the ones that were least likely to end up being a bottle of vinegar 50 or 100 years later, and those vineyards became all-around more expensive, and those specific years become extremely expensive. Especially as they get older and older.
This doesn't seem like that big of a deal these days, but that's because we take food preservation for granted most of the time. Anything that could last for several years was a very big deal, especially when we were still sailing around the planet in wooden boats with sails and taking months or years to complete voyages. It wasn't like you could just stop into the local grocery store in South American & pick up a bottle of wine from France.
Now there is a final piece of the puzzle here, and that's how mature the wine is. Most wine takes a few years to mature, and needs to be stored
They've been doing this for years, actually. (Score:5, Informative)
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