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EARTHDATE: March 28, 2010

Official News page 7


REAL LIFE NEWS: HOW NUCLEAR WARFARE HELPS COMBAT FAKE WINE

by Hazed

Nuclear war. What is it good for? Absolutely nothing. Huh. Say it again. Actually, it has had one unexpected side-benefit - it helps to determine the vintage of wines, thus combating counterfeiters.

As any wine buff will know, there can be a big variation in the quality of the wine produced year on year, and thus the price it can be sold for. Too much or too little rain at the crucial points in the growing cycle can ruin the grapes, with the result that the wine is of much lower quality, and not worth so much.

So there's a temptation to mislabel wines and sell stuff from a poor year as if it was from a good year. Experts estimate that as much as 5% of all fine wines sold today are actually poor quality wines, sold under false vintage.

A Professor at the University of Adelaide in Australia has come up with a way to counter the counterfeiters - he can figure out the precise year a bottle of wine was produced, thanks to two decades of post-war Atomic bomb tests.

It works much like carbon dating which is used to date archaeological materials. It relies on the decay of the carbon-14 isotope. Starting in the late 1940s and running up to 1963, atmospheric atomic explosions increased the amount of C-14 in the atmosphere. Once the tests ceased, a clock started ticking - that C-14 started to become diluted by CO2 in the atmosphere.

The vines that grow the grapes for wine absorb some of the radioactive carbon through photosynthesis, and since the precise carbon ratio is known for each year from the late fifties onwards, it's now possible to determine the exact year a wine was produced in, using its carbon content.

What an ingenious use of an otherwise unpleasant phenomenon!

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