Using low frequency full bottle diamagnetic screening to study collectible wine

Angel's share combats wine fraud: (14)C dating of wine without opening the bottle

The problem of fraud continues to plague the wine industry, and detecting cases where the original bottle has been refilled with an inferior vintage is especially difficult. A novel noninvasive procedure presented here relies on radiocarbon dating the so-called angel's share: the trace amounts of ethanol and other gases that diffuse into and through the cork as bottled wine ages and matures. These are collected by applying a vacuum to the top of the bottle and cryo-trapping the extracted gas, leaving the liquid contents untouched. Vintage verification is therefore possible without exposing the liquid contents to the atmosphere, which may render a bottle costing tens of thousands of dollars worthless for later resale and consumption. The method also has a potential for stable isotope ratio as well as chemical analysis to find indications for fraud or spoilage of fine and rare wines as well as other liquids with cork stoppers.

Application of bivariate statistics to full wine bottle diamagnetic screening data

A bivariate correlated Student distribution is applied to full wine bottle diamagnetic screening measurements. Previous work involving a limited number of rare wines indicated that like wines cluster in a plot of the first two principal component scores derived from a covariance matrix of the diamagnetic screening measurements. This study extends the approach to a much larger, statistically meaningful sixty bottle wine library where bivariate statistics are used to comment on the measured data. The full bottle diamagnetic screening of thirty-six identically labeled, sealed bottles of wine obtained from four different sources combined with principal component analysis data reduction followed by treatment with a bivariate distribution permit the effect of wine transport and storage to be observed. The usefulness and future success of the method towards the identification of counterfeit wines is mentioned.