Your fancy wine could be fake. Some hope to smell a solution

“One of the best producers of Burgundy asked us if they could use our labels on all their bottles. So we can create an additional step so that when you buy the bottle, let’s say from the distributor in the UK or in the United States, you can add the bottle to your wallet,” he says. “But now, the idea is that you remove the bottle only when you want to drink the wine. Otherwise it doesn’t make sense because you remove the bottle from the chain of perfect provenance.

Gaetano admits that, strictly speaking, Crurated’s system does not prevent dedicated fraudsters from exchanging the contents of a bottle (if they can bypass the NFC tag on the neck), but he says that reliable authentication comes from not allowing never the place of the wine to be not counted. in order.

If you need to check if a wine is the real deal, then you need a different technological solution. Some wineries have employed advanced printing techniques for their labels, embedding holograms and printing with invisible inks, but the real prize is an authentication process for what’s in the bottle.

The number of different parameters to test – the age of the wine, its place of origin, its chemical composition – means that the problem has been attacked in different ways. A team from the University of Adelaide was able to demonstrate that absorption-transmission and excitation-emission matrix (A-TEEM) spectroscopy, essentially a highly sophisticated scan of a sample, could reliably determine the vintage of a selection of Shiraz wines, while also accurately associating each with a particular sub-region of the Barossa. Valley area.

In the same way, different studies have shown that nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, which works along similar lines to an MRI scanner, can detect different levels of deuterium, a hydrogen isotope and different amino acids in wine, allowing scientists to identify different vintages and types.

A vineyard’s terroir can be “fingerprinted” in terms of the rainfall it experiences, with different areas known to have chemically distinct rainwater: 2007 card showed that analysis of “stable isotopes” in the water used to make wine could accurately distinguish between different regions of California and Oregon.

Perhaps surprisingly, even the most famous experts recognize that it may be impossible to detect a fake by smell or taste, no matter how nuanced the palette. But where humanity’s nose is defeated, a machine can still smell the truth. A team of academics from several institutions published a paper in 2023 who showed that by using a method called gas chromatography to analyze the aroma profiles of 80 Bordeaux wines, they could distinguish between the twenty from seven particular estates across the left and right banks of the river.