Nuclear Fallout Exposes Fake 'Antique' Whisky (livescience.com) 76
Lasrick quotes the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:
Scientists with only the pursuit of truth in mind have proven — through meticulous radio-carbon dating and no tasting at all — that half the bottles of expensive aged Scotch whisky they tested weren't as old and valuable as purported.
Researchers from the Radiocarbon Lab at the Scottish Universities Environmental Research Centre in Glasgow, Scotland used the amounts of radioactive carbon-14 in various Scotches that they absolutely did not sample to determine whether the whiskies were made before or after large-scale above-ground testing of nuclear devices began in the 1950s and 1960s.
LiveScience explains: Nuclear bombs that were detonated decades ago spewed the radioactive isotope carbon-14 into the atmosphere; from there, the isotope was absorbed by plants and other living organisms, and began to decay after the organisms died. Traces of this excess carbon-14 can therefore be found in barley that was harvested and distilled to make whisky.
Carbon-14 decays at a known rate; by calculating the amount of the isotope in a given whisky batch, scientists can then determine if a bottle's contents were produced after the start of the nuclear age — and if that age matches the date written on the bottle's label.
Researchers from the Radiocarbon Lab at the Scottish Universities Environmental Research Centre in Glasgow, Scotland used the amounts of radioactive carbon-14 in various Scotches that they absolutely did not sample to determine whether the whiskies were made before or after large-scale above-ground testing of nuclear devices began in the 1950s and 1960s.
LiveScience explains: Nuclear bombs that were detonated decades ago spewed the radioactive isotope carbon-14 into the atmosphere; from there, the isotope was absorbed by plants and other living organisms, and began to decay after the organisms died. Traces of this excess carbon-14 can therefore be found in barley that was harvested and distilled to make whisky.
Carbon-14 decays at a known rate; by calculating the amount of the isotope in a given whisky batch, scientists can then determine if a bottle's contents were produced after the start of the nuclear age — and if that age matches the date written on the bottle's label.
Works for wine and other things, too? (Score:2)
Re:Works for wine and other things, too? (Score:4, Interesting)
The best wine I ever tasted was 3 years old, but it was also only $16.
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In fairness, the bottle I was talking about was probably $25 when it was just bottled, but I got it on sale at Bi-Mart.
Whenever I tried a wine I really liked, and then bought the same label that was a couple years older, it was always worse. Always. Some years are better than others, and that was always why it stood out.
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the bottle I was talking about was probably $25 when it was just bottled, but I got it on sale at Bi-Mart.
Bi-Mart? So they swing both ways, selling alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages?
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I remember 1988 and 1989 being superb!
Re: Works for wine and other things, too? (Score:3)
The best wine I ever tasted, was still grapes on the vine!
Let's be honest: Anyone who think wine tastes better than fresh ripe chilled grapes, needs to get his head checked.
Wine and beer only exist for two reasons: To get you drunk on the cheap.
Oh, and here in Germany, a good bordeaux can be had for 1.99 EUR. Hell, a great bottle of Champagner is 12 EUR at Aldi, according to "wine experts". (Beer can be cheaper than bottled(!) water here, so no comments.)
Price is rather irrelevant. And so are experts, thoug
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I'm not into alcohol, but I really like dealcoholized white wine. For me thus, fermentation is a way to get rid of the sugar.
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Have you ever tried wine grapes? Full of seeds, usually with a very strong, tart flavor, thick skins, and not anywhere near as sweet as "table grapes".
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Actually, I think getting drunk on the cheap is what cheap spirits are for - I can get a bottle of cheap gran vodka or whiskey that contains at least 2-3x as much alcohol as the equivalent price worth of wine or beer.
Wine and beer span the spectrum from cheap swill to carefully crafted rich and complex flavors. They're usually not particularly sweet - but a lot of people don't like sweet things, especially not all the time. Fruit juice and sodas are just sugar-water, and I've got to really be in the righ
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The best wine I tasted was in a Winery from the families own barrels, the wine they did no sell to the public. Greater care has to be taken, zero chemicals added and there is a chance it will become vinegar but that is the risk you have to take to produce a really nice tasting wine free of chemicals.
People are not buying how old the wine or spirit is, egoistic nob heads are feeding the ego spending ego driven amount of marketing illusions of exclusivity, they are special nob heads because they can piss a th
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There was a time that wine making was a black art. Now it's chemistry. There's no reason that a $20 wine can't be as good as a $100 one.
The thing is there's no such thing as the "best" wine. That's like asking what the best painting in a museum is. You can have a favorite, but the museum wouldn't be improved by replacing everything with copies of your favorite painting.
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Asking what the "best" painting is is stupid, and yet, not all art is of equal quality.
Could there be other ways to measure quality than "best," and if so, would you still have a point?
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Different genres of art can't even be measured by the same quality scales. You wouldn't hold a hard-boiled detective thriller to the same prose style standard you'd hold a literary novel; or flipping that around pacing is really important in a thriller and not so much in a literary novel.
I guess by the same token you wouldn't judge a wine you intend to eat with a slice of pizza the same way you'd judge a wine you plan to share with your wine snob buddies.
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If you're selecting "a wine you plan to share with your wine snob buddies," you're the wine snob, and your buddies wish you'd shut up and bring a case of beer next time.
If you're actually friends with a wine snob, and it isn't you, you don't try to bring them wine.
Just like, if your friend is an art snob, you don't buy a doodle from the guy on the street corner and bring it to them as a gift.
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Re: Works for wine and other things, too? (Score:1)
And who's pathetic enough to be impressed by that?
Let's be honest: Everyone's thinking "OMG what a loser. Hasn't he got anything else to fill his empty soul?".
Re: Works for wine and other things, too? (Score:4, Insightful)
My dad has wine bottles from 1977, stored in an old basement in France, correct conditions. The last time we tried drinking that batch it was not great, it tasted old, not aged. We ended using it to deglaze the pan where we cooked tripe sausages, that worked well with the tripes.
The reason we still have these old bottles is because we donâ(TM)t enjoy drinking them.
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Re: Works for wine and other things, too? (Score:2)
Don't use bad wine for your sauces.
All you'll get, is bad sauces.
Re:Works for wine and other things, too? (Score:5, Informative)
With that said, it's different for wines and whiskies. Wine continues to age in the bottle, and not always for the better. Whisky ages in the vat, once bottled very little happens to it. A taste master (or whatever they are called) can sample a vat and decide it will benefit from more aging, or that it's best bottled now, or (more commonly) mixed with other vintages. Incidentally, so called single malts are almost always blends, only from a single distillery that mixes different vintages to maintain a consistent taste; the year on the bottle will be the youngest whisky in the mix. They also get diluted to an alcohol content that best matches the taste. Single cask whiskies are unblended - and often not diluted, so they are at "cask strength", 55% - 60% - and rarer, since no 2 casks will be exactly the same, and once the cask is finished, it's gone. Most really old whiskies seem to be of the latter variety.
If you run into a really good whisky, and you leave the bottle for 20 years, it'll taste the same, even with the bottle opened. What I like about whisky is that, unless you get into serious "collector territory", you generally get what you pay for. In the end it's still a matter of taste of course, but most whiskies that have had the privilege of more time in the cask have benefited from that.
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If you run into a really good whisky, and you leave the bottle for 20 years, it'll taste the same, even with the bottle opened. What I like about whisky is that, unless you get into serious "collector territory", you generally get what you pay for. In the end it's still a matter of taste of course, but most whiskies that have had the privilege of more time in the cask have benefited from that.
Actually, that is not quite true. A bottle of whiskey that has been opened and stored in the bottle will oxidize if left to age. This will change the taste of the whiskey over time, especially with more air that is in the bottle (i.e. the difference between a bottle being almost full and almost empty). Most bottles of whiskey are corked, which is not actually air tight (this is why you see many whiskies which dip the bottle top in sealing wax). A whiskey is also not supposed to be stored such that it is on
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I recently decided to drink up my Napa Valley reds from the 90s. While none had gone bad they weren't as good as I was expecting. And many of the corks disintegrated whilst pulling them out.
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I think that aging isn't really the point once the wine has matured. Wine quality can vary wildly from year to year due to a wide range of factors. Some years are bad, some are mediocre, and some are truly sublime. If wine from a year is bad, or even just moderately good, nobody is going to save it for years - you drink it when you want a buzz and move on. It's those sublime years though that you save bottles from. If you find a 50 or 100 year old bottle of wine it's probably because it was an incredib
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Presumably. I remember seeing this very thing on a TV show once, I think it was "White Collar."
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If it tastes different, they did something wrong. It was not supposed to taste different.
They import water from Scotland to make it, to prevent that from happening. The flavor should come from the water and the process, not the location of the process.
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I think you're mixing two different things... Japan did import (maybe they still do) Scottish water to mix with their whisky (source [heraldscotland.com]).
However, their whisky is distilled with local water. I used to pass in front of the Suntory Yamazaki distillery pretty much every day, the distillery was installed in that location due to the high quality water source in the mountain. The other Suntory distillery, Hakushu, was similarly installed next to a high quality water source. The site of the original Nikka distillery,
This is really old news (Score:1)
Neither dupe or corpse.... (Score:1)
...It's a ZOMBI news (that's the problem with radiation... according to *serious* comics)... ... ... you know ;-)
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certainly the need to adjust carbon dating results because of nuclear testing is known, but I don't recall an article on dating booze before
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From the abstract: "We have created a 14C calibration curve derived from known-age, single malt whiskies for the period 1950–2015 ..."
Also, the publication date:
Volume 62, Issue 1
February 2020 , pp. 51-62
It isn't science if only one person does the test, ever. The thousands time isn't news, but the second time might be bigger news than the first.
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Offtopic but related :
There is a market for prior to WW2 steel.
Somehow in my past, I had a need for thick plate steel. and I was quoted 2 prices, new or before atomic's. I asked them why I got 2 prices and they said "it's for the medical field and they have a requirement for specific rooms "
it's interesting to note that all modern day steel has a different signature that the same type from the past.
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Why do people think that it is sensible to spout bullshit without actually checking the easily-checkable. It's not as if you're going to get away without being fact-checked. Who do you think
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and that this is a new technique in that field.
Yes, using carbon 14 dating is so new that There was a write up about Oxford doing it almost 10 years ago in Scientific American [scientificamerican.com] And a story here on /. ten years ago [slashdot.org]
Why do people think that it is sensible to spout bullshit without actually checking the easily-checkable.
Dunno. Why don't you ask yourself?
It's not as if you're going to get away without being fact-checked.
Right back at you
Who do you think you are? Donald J Tangerine Shitgibbon?
Are you sure you're not related to him? You certainly behave the same. Run your mouth, make accusations, call people names. Are you a second cousin perhaps?
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In any case, everyone and their dog has known how to fake old C14 dates since the 1950s. Nobody has been seen to do it because the costs are non-trivial and the benefits in cash terms insufficient. Faking whiskeys would be one of the potentially more profitable lines to do it on. When the wreck of the SS Politician was re-located and dived in the late 80s, some of us were debating how you could spoof a genuine 1940 whiskey
Fake whiskey (Score:4, Insightful)
This is old news as anytime you have a product that is hard to value, be it real estate or alcohol, whose value is largely based on pest up desire, you will get people who will meet that desire.
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A good sign is a place that starts selling only vodka and gin - no aging required - and then moves on after a few years to offering whiskey or rum (once they've aged it enough themselves to count).
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Nuclear bombs? (Score:5, Informative)
This is not how radiocarbon dating [wikipedia.org] works.
Granted, the nuclear tests in the 50s and 60s significantly raised the atmospheric ratio of C-14 to C-12, which should be accounted for, but C-14 is created naturally in the atmosphere, which is what allows the dating of samples tens of thousands of years old.
Re:Nuclear bombs? (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah, they're not "carbon dating" the whiskey at all.
Thanks to the measurement of 14C from tree rings, we have a pretty good record of the relative amount of 14C in the atmosphere for each year, going back more than 10K years. It varies somewhat naturally, but there were some significant injections of bomb-generated 14C during the period of above-ground atomic testing. Anyway, 14C labs usually make use of this record to fine-tune their results when carbon-dating samples where they already have some general idea of the age of a artifact (or whatever).
Grains are going to be annuals or biennials, so any 14C it contains will reflect the amount of 14C which was in the atmosphere during their short period of growth - adjusted for fractionation, since the plant will preferentially take up 12C over 14C. Whiskies which were produced prior to the era of atomic testing should reflect the lower level of atmospheric 14C from that time. If the whiskey shows a relatively high amount of 14C, it was obviously produced after the start of atmospheric nuclear testing.
Additionally, since the 14C results can be somewhat ambiguous due to the "spikey" nature of the atmospheric levels (since above-ground testing ended in the 1960s), it sounds like they're fine-tuning their results using the stable isotope 13C. There are good long-term measurements of atmospheric 13C which were often taken from the same wood as the 14C results. Also - and this is probably more applicable to Scotland - there are long annualized records of atmospheric 13C which were taken by sampling undisturbed peat bog layers.
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There is also (up to) several years of storage of the grain between harvest and malting and mashing.
This is not conventional radiocarbon dating, but using one of the well-known complicating factors in conventional RC to answer a specific, recent dating problem. There's not a lot of benefit to be gained from putting 60 year old whisky into bottles
Method as stated in answer will not work (Score:1)
Whisky is agend in barrels. THe wood of that barrel will carbon exchange with the whiskey's own carbon. So you are going to blend many different things together with different isotope ratios.
However what would work instead is to look at the plutonium content of the whiskey. Old whiskey will not have any if it was kept in the barrels it was made from
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I don't know how the manufacture of spirit drinks goes in your country, but in Scotland whiskies get several changes of barrel between the distillation plant and the bottling plant.
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>This is not how radiocarbon dating [wikipedia.org] works.
Umm, yes it is. You look at the ratio of C-14 to C-12 is in the sample now, guess at the ratio when the organism it came from died and environmental carbon exchange stopped, and then calculate how many years had to pass for the original ratio amount of C-14 to decay to what you see now.
Normally, a quick-and-dirty naive approximation of the original C-14 value is that atmospheric C-14 production is the only source and remains constant at all times
This whisky is so old they had to carbon-date it (Score:2)
How much alcohol is in it?
Re: This whisky is so old they had to carbon-date (Score:2)
And how well is the alcohol hidden.
I found a good orange juice can *completely* hide up to 50% of the best-filtered/-distilled vodka. (Which, let's be honest, is de-facto low-grade pure medicinal alcohol and rain water, and hence has no flavor other than "alcohol".)
Although the best way to not taste alcohol, is of course, if you already drank alcohol. ;)
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Or are you trying to spike people's drinks? In which case, there are much more effective "date rape" drugs on the market than alcohol. Ask your dealer for some GHB or Rohypnol [wikipedia.org]. You're already looking at decades on the sex offender's wing, so there is no point in trying to minimise what you're doing.
I don't get that whisky fetish of some snobs. (Score:2, Insightful)
The worst part is that they will *always* say you just haven't tasted a good one yet. You could the Highlander himself, with half a dozen centuries of experience, and being personal friends with half of the whisky makers of Scotland.
I'm sorry, but it still tastes like wood and lighter fluid [youtu.be]. And as far as I can tell, people who "like" it, are either straight-up lying, their inferiority complex compensation truly talked them into it, or they literally killed their taste buds. Just like with black coffee, bee
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Yes. People can't seem to get that things taste different to different people. I hate peas. I've had so many people tell me, how can you not like peas, "you can't even taste them," I think they are being honest, but to me, peas have one of the strongest tastes of any food. It totally obliterates any other taste they are with. Accidentally getting a pea in a pot pie just yields an explosion of awfulness when it "pops". The awfulness is mostly from how strong the flavor is. Same kind of thing w
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In addition to that, some people just enjoy different tastes. I'd agree with you that lobster tastes like sea water, among other flavors,
Re: I don't get that whisky fetish of some snobs. (Score:2)
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Different folks, different strokes.
I don't recommend the hot acid.
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Huh? Wow, where'd the bizarre personal attacks come from?
Believe it or not, there are people out there who enjoy the bitter end of the taste spectrum. We have those receptors on our tongues, and why not use them?
Moreover whiskey is a very strong taste, and you will find all over the world that each culture's favorite foods are the ones that taste the strongest. In the West it's caviar, in Greenland it's seal meat that's been "cured" i.e. left to rot for a bit, in Korea it's kimchi, etc. etc.
And I can
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Re: I don't get that whisky fetish of some snobs. (Score:1)
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Well, if you don't like Whisky - please stop drinking it and leave it for me.
I had two double shots of 12 year old Highland Park a double of really nice Rum and a double of Red Breast (Irish Whisky).
My favorites are Edradour Caledonia, Ardbeg, Laphroaig, Lagavulin, Highland Park (see above),Tobermory and a mix of the Glen's. I can taste the difference sorry that your genetics will not allow you to enjoy. Your loss.
Yes, I am somewhat of a scotch bigot, not a snob really. I do not care for blends - although I
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I've not encountered the "Red Breast". I'll keep my eyes peeled for that one.
Low-radioactivity steel (Score:2)
Your mileage may vary (Score:2)