Tag Archives: wine

If Only Ensign Pulver Had Known

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(OK, that was making fake “Red Label” Scotch)

We already know you can check your wine and find out if it’s bad

Now there’s How to make cheap wine taste like a fine vintage

The secret this time is an electric field. Pass an undrinkable, raw red wine between a set of high-voltage electrodes and it becomes pleasantly quaffable. “Using an electric field to accelerate ageing is a feasible way to shorten maturation times and improve the quality of young wine,” says Hervé Alexandre, professor of oenology at the University of Burgundy, close to some of France’s finest vineyards.

University of Burgundy. Figures. They don’t do this kind of work at Boone’s Farm State University, or Ripple Tech.

Physics: Don't Wine About It

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You can use NMR to tell you if it’s still good, and now you can tell how old the bottles are by hitting them with an ion beam.

Nuclear Physicists Fight Wine Fraud

The beams, which are directed at the glass, not the wine, can distinguish how old the bottles are and where they might originate.
[…]
To prevent counterfeiters from filling authentic old bottles with ordinary wine, Williams intends to combine the ion beam test with another established method that checks for levels of a radioactive isotope, Caesium 137, in the wine itself.
This technique, however, is only effective in identifying wines made in the era of heavy atomic weapons testing in the latter half of the 20th century.

Mmmmm. Cs-137. I know that’s what gave last year’s Beaujolais Nouveau such a perky flavor.

Update: Jennifer Ouellette has a rather extensive post about wine fraud over at Cocktail Party Physics (though this is wine, and technically not a cocktail. But it’s some interesting history and more information. The New Yorker article she mentions is quite interesting)