How Atomic Particles Helped Solve A Wine Fraud Mystery
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June 03, 2014 3:31 AM ET
In a laboratory, deep under a mile-high stretch of the Alps on the French-Italian border, , a physicist at the University of Bordeaux, is testing the authenticity of a bottle of wine.
"We are looking for radioactivity in the wine," says Hubert. "Most of the time the collectors send me bottles of wine because they want to know if it is fake or not."
By taking the bottle in the hand and putting it close to a detector, Hubert records the gamma rays. The level of those gamma rays emitted can often tell him something about when the wine was bottled. For example, if it was bottled before about 1945, there shouldn't be any cesium 137 — radioactive evidence of exploded nuclear bombs and the Atomic Age — in the wine.
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The Cesium 137 Test
Jim Elroy had a hunch that the wine in the Jefferson bottles did not date back to the 18th century, but he needed a way to prove it, preferably without opening the bottle and destroying its contents.
Herve Guegan of the Nuclear Research Centre of Bordeaux runs a test on a 1944 vintage bottle of Medoc wine.
Regis Duvignau/Reuters /Landov
"I started looking in Scientific American magazine," said Elroy, "and I found an article that Philippe Hubert, a French physicist, had written about using low-level gamma ray detection for cesium 137 to date wine. Cesium 137 did not exist on this planet until we exploded the first atomic bomb."
As physicist Philippe Hubert explains: "The cesium radioactivity we find in the wines reflects exactly the history of the Atomic Age. It is radioactive isotope, which is not natural. It's a fission product. First you had the development of the nuclear bomb: Hiroshima, Nagasaki. Then in the '50s and '60s, the Cold War between the U.S. and Soviets, and the nuclear atmospheric tests. Then in 1986 — the Chernobyl accident, which released a lot of cesium activity into the atmosphere. And then Fukushima Daiichi in Japan — we are following that."
This radioactivity is everywhere on Earth — in our food, clothing, the cells of our body. "It is in the atmosphere," says Hubert. "And then with rain this radioactivity falls on the grapes. When you make the wine, this comes into the wine and stays into the wine."
Jim Elroy was confident that this was going to be the smoking gun that would prove Rodenstock guilty of fabricating the Jefferson bottles. He personally flew to the French-Italian border where Hubert was going to do the test, carrying the Jefferson bottles in bulletproof cases.
"By looking at the level of gamma rays emitted from a bottle of wine," Elroy explains, Hubert could determine when the wine was bottle. Obviously, if it was bottled before about 1945, there shouldn't be any Cesium 137 in the wine."
The experiment took place a mile underground to shield the test from the gamma rays in the atmosphere. "In order to shield the detector even further," says Elroy, "we had to use lead that was smelted prior to 1945. In this case, it was Roman lead smelted shortly after the birth of Christ."
Hubert subjected the Jefferson bottles to the test. "We don't need to open the bottles," says Hubert. "The gamma rays can escape the wine and cross the thickness of the glass without any problem."
"Unfortunately," says Hubert, "we could not detect any cesium inside the wine."
So it was certain that the wine had been bottled before the Atomic Age. But there was no way this test could prove whether or not this wine was as old as Jefferson.
Recipes And Dentistry Provide More Clues
Counterfeiting wine is nothing new. People have been doing it for centuries. "Louis XIV had a royal decree that all of the wine barrels coming from the Côtes du Rhône area had to be stamped with a CDR to prove that they were Côtes du Rhône," says wine detective Maureen Downey.
In modern times, fraudster Rudy Kurniawan, who is now in jail for creating and selling counterfeit wine, built an entire laboratory in his condo in California.
"Kurniawan's kitchen was literally a factory for making counterfeit wine," says Downey, who went through the evidence with the FBI. "He had recipes written on bottles in his kitchen. For example, his recipe for 1945 Mouton Rothschild said: one-half 1988 Pichon Melant; one-quarter oxidized Bordeaux; and one-quarter Napa Cab."
"You're not talking about plonk that is being put into these bottles," says Downey. "These are careful recipes. I don't know if Kurniawan was a great chef or a chemist."
And what about those Jefferson bottles? Bill Koch's investigators tracked down the people in Germany who had engraved the Jefferson bottles with Th.J. They used a modern dentist tool that could not possibly have existed in the time of Thomas Jefferson.
"One expert likens it to Abraham Lincoln holding an iPhone," says Downey. "When you've got Abraham Lincoln in a photograph holding an iPhone, we've got a problem."