It is possible that your fine wine is counterfeit. Some hope for a solution

“One of the best producers in Burgundy was asking us if they could use our labels on all their bottles. Then we could create an additional step so that when you buy the bottle, let’s say from a distributor in the UK or the US, you can add the bottle to your wallet. But now the idea is that you Only remove the bottle when you want to drink the wine, otherwise it is meaningless because you are removing the bottle from the ideal source chain.

Gaetano admits that, strictly speaking, the Crurated system doesn’t prevent dedicated crooks from altering the bottle’s contents (if they can circumvent the NFC tag on the neck), but he says trustworthy authentication comes from never letting in the whereabouts of the wine. to.

If you find yourself needing to confirm whether a wine is the real deal, you’ll need a completely different technological solution. Some wineries have used advanced printing techniques for their labels, incorporating 3D images and printing with invisible inks, but the real prize is the process of validating what’s inside the bottle.

The number of different factors that have to be tested – the age of the wine, its place of origin, its chemical composition – means that the problem has been attacked in different ways. It was a team from the University of Adelaide Able to pretend Absorption, transmission, excitation and emission matrix (A-TEEM) spectroscopy, essentially a highly sophisticated scan of a sample, can reliably ascertain the vintage year of a selection of Shiraz wines, as well as precisely linking each variety to a particular sub-region of the Barossa. Valley area.

Likewise, different Studies have shown Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, which works similar to an MRI scanner, can detect different levels of deuterium, hydrogen isotopes, and different amino acids in wine, enabling scientists to identify different types and types.

A vineyard’s land can be ‘fingerprinted’ in terms of the amount of rain it receives, with different areas known to have chemically distinct rainwater: Paper 2007 showed that analyzing “stable isotopes” within the water used to make wine could accurately distinguish between different regions of California and Oregon.

Perhaps surprisingly, even the most well-known experts admit that it may be impossible to detect counterfeits by smell or taste, no matter how precise the color palette. But when humanity’s nose is defeated, the machine may still sniff out the truth. A team of academics from multiple institutions published a Paper in 2023 Which showed that by using a method called gas chromatography to analyze the aroma characteristics of 80 Bordeaux wines, they were able to distinguish between wines from seven specific regions across the left and right banks of the river.