New bottle cap thwarts wine counterfeiters

When the Roman historian Pliny the Elder wrote " in vino veritas " – in wine, there is truth – he must not have been drinking from a counterfeit bottle. Researchers Roger Johnston and Jon Warner of the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory have created a device to ensure that modern wine connoisseurs can have faith that they are drinking what they pay for.

In the past few decades, bottles of rare premium vintages have begun to command tens of thousands of dollars apiece at auction, and thousands of other wines retail for hundreds to thousands of dollars a bottle. Although there may be no match for quality of the product inside, the ease and accuracy with which fraudsters can pass off bottles of "two-buck Chuck" with ritzy labels have allowed wine counterfeiting to grow into a booming criminal enterprise.

"One of the biggest problems buyers of very expensive wines have at auctions is that they have no way of being absolutely sure if the bottle contains the wine it purports to without actually opening the bottle and taking a swig," said Johnston.

To combat this problem, Johnston and his colleagues in Argonne 's Vulnerability Assessment Team (VAT) have created a cap that winemakers can fit over the bottle's cork. The cap contains a small circuit that completes when it is removed, triggering an electric pulse that creates electronic evidence someone has tampered with the bottle. "There's no alarm that screams at you if the wine's been opened," Johnston said, "but there's no way of getting rid of the evidence of tampering because basically, when tampering occurs, information is erased—a kind of anti-alarm."

By connecting the cap to a laptop through a USB cable, the auctioneer or the consumer can check whether or not the wine has already been opened or altered. Each cap has a unique bottle number that is registered to the winemaker, preventing wine counterfeiters from putting the Argonne caps on their fake Bordeaux and Burgundies.

In addition to the outright counterfeiting of fine wine, buyers face another potential problem when assessing the purity of a bottle. To preserve the life of some of their wines, some winemakers will remove the cork from the bottle and blend in a small quantity of wine from a newer vintage in a process known as "reconditioning."