Wine Instruction

I thought this article was very interesting. I knew vaguely about counterfeiting in the wine industry and taking expensive bottles and switching out the wine with cheaper wine, but I didn't know the extent to which it was done. This is because for most of us wine drinkers, we don't run across this issue very much. Wine counterfeiters don't bother with wine in anything that is not in the highest tier as it's just not worth their time, and most of us get our wine from reputable distributors at the local liquor store. Usually this is a problem with rare vintages that command tens of thousand of dollars that you would get at an auction house, or some other private sale. Anyway, read on for more!

ARGONNE, Ill (Aug. 1, 2008) — When the Roman historian Pliny
the Elder wrote " in vino veritas " – in wine, there is truth – he must
not have been drinking from a counterfeit bottle. Researchers
Roger Johnston and Jon Warner of the U.S. Department of Energy's
Argonne National Laboratory have created a device to ensure that
modern wine connoisseurs can have faith that they are drinking
what they pay for.

In the past few decades, bottles of rare premium vintages have begun
to command tens of thousands of dollars apiece at auction, and thousands
of other wines retail for hundreds to thousands of dollars a bottle.
Although there may be no match for quality of the product inside,
the ease and accuracy with which fraudsters can pass off bottles
of "two-buck Chuck" with ritzy labels have allowed wine
counterfeiting to grow into a booming criminal enterprise.

This work represents an offshoot of the work by the Vulnerability
Assessment Team (VAT) in Argonne's Nuclear
Engineering (NE). While
the VAT conducts R&D on broad security issues, including nuclear
safeguards, Argonne 's NE division has a long history of addressing
nuclear safeguards and security issues.

"As often happens," Johnston said, "R&D on one
problem can lead to unexpected inventions; that is what happened
here. We were working on tamper and intrusion detection projects
for nuclear safeguards, courier bags, and cargo security, and also
on security for pharmaceuticals. Various concepts and technologies
that were developed for those projects led to the current wine application."

"One of the biggest problems buyers of very expensive wines
have at auctions is that they have no way of being absolutely sure
if the bottle contains the wine it purports to without actually opening
the bottle and taking a swig," said Johnston.

To combat this problem, Johnston and his colleagues in Argonne 's
Vulnerability Assessment Team (VAT) have created a cap that winemakers
can fit over the bottle's cork. The cap contains a small circuit
that completes when it is removed, triggering an electric pulse that
creates electronic evidence someone has tampered with the bottle. "There's
no alarm that screams at you if the wine's been opened," Johnston
said, "but there's no way of getting rid of the evidence of
tampering because basically, when tampering occurs, information is
erased—a kind of anti-alarm."

By connecting the cap to a laptop through a USB cable, the auctioneer
or the consumer can check whether or not the wine has already been
opened or altered. Each cap has a unique bottle number that is registered
to the winemaker, preventing wine counterfeiters from putting the
Argonne caps on their fake Bordeaux and Burgundies.

In addition to the outright counterfeiting of fine wine, buyers
face another potential problem when assessing the purity of a bottle.
To preserve the life of some of their wines, some winemakers will
remove the cork from the bottle and blend in a small quantity of
wine from a newer vintage in a process known as "reconditioning."

Although reconditioned wines may have longer shelf lives, some winemakers
try to pass off their reconditioned bottles as purely the older vintage,
Johnston said. With the Argonne cap, bottles cannot be reconditioned
without the buyer eventually finding out.

Because the vast majority of wine fraud targets the very highest
tier of wine manufacturing, the Argonne cap could become a "status
symbol" among wineries potentially interested in the Argonne
technology, said systems engineer Jon Warner, who works alongside
Johnston in the VAT. "Our device may be able to generate a certain
snob-appeal factor among winemakers; they can say, 'our wine is so
good, we needed to spend money on this security device, although
only a few dollars of parts are used in the device."

Johnston and Warner plan to enhance the security of the cap even
further by connecting it to a high-quality color sensor chip. The
top of the cork would then bear a tie-dye pattern of color swirls
that the chip would have to recognize. According to Johnston , the
sensitivity of the color sensor would make it extraordinarily difficult
for someone to open the cap and put it back close enough to the original
position to fool the sensor.

By Jared Sagoff.

Tags: counterfeit wine - wine - high end wine