Using Cesium-137 testing to find counterfeit wine
kitchensisters.org
kitchensisters.org
Interesting. I haven’t heard they had additives in the oil to detect counterfeits. I assume the fluorescing behaves differently at 620nm and 580nm? I recall they had issues with counterfeits in some countries and have made attempts to combat it with packaging (e.g. specific letters on label fluorescing under UV, and currently their Scantrust app [0] validation tool). I’d be interested to know how it behaves, as having the oil itself fluoresce when not labeled as such might be annoying when using UV dyes for monitoring leaks. For example, I like to run LiquiMoly’s molygen every few changes to monitor changes in seeping on one of my older cars, but it is only helpful when i run the oil w/ dye after non-dyed oil.
[0] https://www.mobil.com/en/sap/our-products/mobil-anti-counter...
not for counterfiet detection but for attribution in case of abuse.
Never pay over say ~$30-40 USD for a bottle of wine if all you care about is taste. That's the gist I got from VEN 3 at UC Davis. And, always buy budget wine while suggesting to people it was "expensive". ;)
People who want to collect expensive wine, more power to them, but it seems to me somewhere between a tulip bulb, Beanie Babies, and art market.
https://localwiki.org/davis/VEN_3
https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/wine-study-shows-price-in...
Incidentally, he once went to a wine auction with a rich friend. The friend bid on a $1000 bottle of wine (ostensibly inexpensive among this crowd) and gave it to my dad as a gift, who ended up not drinking it until years later when his first grandchild was born.
If I remember correctly, he preferred the Two Buck Chuck.
The main innovation of 2BC is it being sold cheap in respectable looking bottles. Cheap decent wine has always existed as box wine or jug wine.
Long before 2BC there was an actual person named Charles Shaw who was a niche winemaker whose company went bankrupt. Bronco Wines (the huge winemaker above) picked up the assets including the brand, and used the brand to create 2BC. Shaw was apparently pissed, but oh well.
Change that to 30-40 EUR from Carrefour? Sure. In the US, not so much.
I do not understand how I can spend a minor fortune on wine in the US and not like a single bottle (including many imported from France!). By contrast, I can spend very reasonable amounts on wine in France and almost never have a bottle that I don't like.
It's more expensive in the UK too for example, but not to the extent it is over there.
This is no explanation at all.
This does not explain why expensive bottles of wine imported from France aren't as good as basic bottles from Carrefour (even from before Sir Random-Tariffs-a-Lot). It also doesn't explain why US wine producers aren't producing basic wine as good as basic wine in France (in my opinion).
US wine producers spend VAST amounts of money on the technology and knowledge to make wine. There is no "magic" in wine production knowledge that the US wine producers wouldn't have figured out by now.
At this point the difference is either fundamental (Napa soil matches France but climate does not, for example) or market driven (French wine drinkers expect better wines so market forces cause sub-par wines to get driven out quicker).
Neither of those explanations are very satisfying. You would expect that an ambitious US wine producer would someone solve anything fundamental. And "market forces" implies that somehow wine in France resists "cheapening forces" that affect every other foodstuff.
My personal hypothesis is that the problem is fundamental and is about batch size (I'm extrapolating a bit from the craft brew scene). Large batch sizes are notoriously different in kinematics from small batch sizes in industrial processes. French wine producers are often making wines from, as seen in the US, very small grape plantations in very small batches. US producers tend toward much larger batches as it vastly increases the profitability, and US small batch producers tend not to have deep knowledge about winemaking.
Americans will say European beer is bad based on this, having never tasted proper Belgians. Europeans will say American cheese is shit, having never tasted Wisconsin's best cheeses. Because for the most part we don't export our best.
Wine is a bit of a lemon market in the USA - there are some knowledgeable buyers but most buyers are laypeople who are faced with 200 options and no way to distinguish them other than price and country of origin. So if the only that that differentiates the wine at the time of purchase (not at the time of consumption), the optimal thing to do is to stock as much cheap wine as you can from each country but then price them all at different tiers. That way someone coming in for a $25 bottle of Spanish wine, finds a $25 bottle of Spanish wine to buy.
Yes there are some discerning customers, but if you fail to cater to them you'll still sell a whole lot of wine to non-discerning customers.
French wines exported to the U.S. don’t really address the low end of the market: Cheaper wines can be had from California’s Central Valley, Eastern Europe, or made domestically from imported grapes, etc. I assume the margins just aren’t high enough to make exporting low-end wines worth it.
Meanwhile back in France the low end is served by French producers using a mix of domestic and imported wine grapes (used to be mainly from North Africa). These are not A.O.C. or even D.O.C, just bulk wine that’s made to be tasty.
Taste and availability can change on locality - California absolutely loves it's Cabernet Sauvignon, for example. Often to the detriment of other varieties and options IMHO.
And this sort of thing also very much affects what's being imported too. People have an idea of what "French Wine" should be like, which may be very different to the taste preferences in regions of France.
Time to re-watch
It's not like some other radioisotopes using in dating, such as carbon-14, which are continuously produced naturally (i.e. by cosmic rays initiating nuclear reactions in the high atmosphere). In that case, an airtight container had a known concentration at the time of its sequestration, and radioisotope dating (to oversimplify) counts the number of half-lives that elapsed since that point. (Or with the example of organic matter—the number of half-lives since a tree was felled into lumber—since it ceased metabolizing atmospheric gases).