Apparently there are companies out there who engineer otherwise inert particles, or mixes of particles, that fluoresce under specific wavelengths, for example Mobil might add the particles to their premium Mobile 1 synthetic motor oil product to find counterfeit products in certain markets. By opening a bottle of oil purchased off the shelf they can hit it with ~620nm && ~580nm and if it does not respond correctly, it is relatively easy to demonstrate that it is counterfeit and quickly get it removed from shelves. This can also be applied to crude oil and quietly tested at the refinery to verify it hasn't been diluted with similar product.
> Mobil might add the particles to their premium Mobile 1 synthetic motor oil product to find counterfeit products in certain markets. By opening a bottle of oil purchased off the shelf they can hit it with ~620nm && ~580nm and if it does not respond correctly
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.
From what I've read, there are also fluorescent compounds in the other fluids used in cars. A mechanic can shine a UV light under your hood and spot the leaks.
Pretty wild story. Reminded me of the story of salvaging a Roman trade vessel off the coast of Greece. Everyone carefully cataloged and managed the various amphorae of trade goods, and one of the divers made off with a quarter million dollars worth of lead keel weights. :-)
I've been looking for it but have yet to find it. My memory has it being in Smithsonian magazine but I've gone through the last 6 years that I have digitized and nothing.
If I buy a bottle of plonk for $20 and it tastes as I except, I don't stress about what gamma rays it's emitting. I just reckon I got what I paid for. Of course, if I payed $1 million, and I dare not open it, I might stress quite a lot. But really, that's for other people not me. I sadly don't have a million bucks to spend on wine.
At these numbers you don't buy a product, you buy an investment with the intent to sell it later on; if it turns out to be a fake though, it's worthless. On the other hand, if you get it verified, it goes up in value by a lot.
Collectable wine is essentially orthogonal to quality and taste when blind tasted.
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.
Two Buck Chuck was a famously inexpensive and delicious wine from... Trader Joe's, I think? Though last I heard it got moved to Three Buck Chuck. It's my dad's favorite.
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.
2 buck Chuck (now around 4 bucks) was never a particular wine or wine blend. It is whatever the factory happened to overproduce in the hope of selling it under more expensive labels. Whatever was left over got sold as 2 buck Chuck. It tends to be perfectly good wine, but not consistent at all from one shopping trip to the next.
TIL! I basically don’t drink anything but makgeolli and soju these days, and I’ve never been much into wine, but that’s such a neat approach. Whoever was choosing which wine overproduction to buy was a real monster it seems.
> Never pay over say ~$30-40 USD for a bottle of wine if all you care about is taste.
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.
I feel there will be a $30-40 bottle that will match your preferences, you just need to find it.
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.
> You've answered it yourself? 'imported from France'.
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.
I find most countries which produce a range of a particular consumer food/beverage tend to export their lowest quality of that good in the largest quantities. Globally, it's relatively easy to find either Stella Artois, Heineken, Guinness, Corona, Fosters, Budweiser, Asahi, or Tsingtao wherever you go. They're not great. But each of their respective countries makes fantastic beer - they just drink it all domestically.
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.
You’re mixing up the high-end and low-end markets.
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.
wine is one of those things that allow for indirect sampling of conditions at or about the vintage year. this may be more valuable than a vicarious, but high class swig of conspicuous consumption.
I wish I could find the study but there was one done where people were given the same wine samples and then told how much the bottle cost - either a low or high number. People enjoyed the "expensive" wine more and rated it more highly. Like you, at 1M I might feel more like "why did we waste money on this?"
The idea with cesium-137 is that it didn't exist naturally in significant quantities prior to 1945. An airtight container, sealed from the atmosphere prior to 1945, should not contain any.
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).
Nuclear explosions in the atmosphere also changed the isotopic concentration of the atmosphere so much that it's a clear delineation of the "modern era" in almost all radioisotope dating.
Half life is just time until only half of the original amount remains. Double that and it represents the time it takes to halve again. The actual detection threshold would be separate from half life.
Cesium 137 decays to barium 137 which is stable and naturally occurring, so the cesium daughter wouldn't be useful for this case (non-destructive testing of sealed wine bottles).
It's a pretty wild story. Rudy was also very prolific so there are a lot of his bottles out there in collections and potentially still on the auction market. He had a huge impact on the expensive wine collection trade.
Apparently there are companies out there who engineer otherwise inert particles, or mixes of particles, that fluoresce under specific wavelengths, for example Mobil might add the particles to their premium Mobile 1 synthetic motor oil product to find counterfeit products in certain markets. By opening a bottle of oil purchased off the shelf they can hit it with ~620nm && ~580nm and if it does not respond correctly, it is relatively easy to demonstrate that it is counterfeit and quickly get it removed from shelves. This can also be applied to crude oil and quietly tested at the refinery to verify it hasn't been diluted with similar product.
> Mobil might add the particles to their premium Mobile 1 synthetic motor oil product to find counterfeit products in certain markets. By opening a bottle of oil purchased off the shelf they can hit it with ~620nm && ~580nm and if it does not respond correctly
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...
From what I've read, there are also fluorescent compounds in the other fluids used in cars. A mechanic can shine a UV light under your hood and spot the leaks.
not only oil, chemical reagents on watch list , explosives, probably reloading powder. fertilizer components.
not for counterfiet detection but for attribution in case of abuse.
Pretty wild story. Reminded me of the story of salvaging a Roman trade vessel off the coast of Greece. Everyone carefully cataloged and managed the various amphorae of trade goods, and one of the divers made off with a quarter million dollars worth of lead keel weights. :-)
With lead costing about $2/kilo, that would be about 125 tons of lead.
"Roman" lead has no Cesium in it, which is important for some radiological instruments.
Do you have a link?
I've been looking for it but have yet to find it. My memory has it being in Smithsonian magazine but I've gone through the last 6 years that I have digitized and nothing.
If I buy a bottle of plonk for $20 and it tastes as I except, I don't stress about what gamma rays it's emitting. I just reckon I got what I paid for. Of course, if I payed $1 million, and I dare not open it, I might stress quite a lot. But really, that's for other people not me. I sadly don't have a million bucks to spend on wine.
At these numbers you don't buy a product, you buy an investment with the intent to sell it later on; if it turns out to be a fake though, it's worthless. On the other hand, if you get it verified, it goes up in value by a lot.
Collectable wine is essentially orthogonal to quality and taste when blind tasted.
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...
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-08080-0
Two Buck Chuck was a famously inexpensive and delicious wine from... Trader Joe's, I think? Though last I heard it got moved to Three Buck Chuck. It's my dad's favorite.
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.
2 buck Chuck (now around 4 bucks) was never a particular wine or wine blend. It is whatever the factory happened to overproduce in the hope of selling it under more expensive labels. Whatever was left over got sold as 2 buck Chuck. It tends to be perfectly good wine, but not consistent at all from one shopping trip to the next.
TIL! I basically don’t drink anything but makgeolli and soju these days, and I’ve never been much into wine, but that’s such a neat approach. Whoever was choosing which wine overproduction to buy was a real monster it seems.
I suppose it's like rare classic cars. They're usually not great to drive, and often aren't ever driven.
> Never pay over say ~$30-40 USD for a bottle of wine if all you care about is taste.
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.
I feel there will be a $30-40 bottle that will match your preferences, you just need to find it.
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.
You've answered it yourself? 'imported from France'.
It's more expensive in the UK too for example, but not to the extent it is over there.
> You've answered it yourself? 'imported from France'.
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.
I find most countries which produce a range of a particular consumer food/beverage tend to export their lowest quality of that good in the largest quantities. Globally, it's relatively easy to find either Stella Artois, Heineken, Guinness, Corona, Fosters, Budweiser, Asahi, or Tsingtao wherever you go. They're not great. But each of their respective countries makes fantastic beer - they just drink it all domestically.
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.
You’re mixing up the high-end and low-end markets.
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.
wine is one of those things that allow for indirect sampling of conditions at or about the vintage year. this may be more valuable than a vicarious, but high class swig of conspicuous consumption.
I wish I could find the study but there was one done where people were given the same wine samples and then told how much the bottle cost - either a low or high number. People enjoyed the "expensive" wine more and rated it more highly. Like you, at 1M I might feel more like "why did we waste money on this?"
Oh cool this was what they did in White Collar! Good ol' Neal Caffery vs. Matt Kessler (I think was his name)
Time to re-watch
It should be noted that cesium dating works for counterits produced in last ~60 years (or less) as Cesium-137 half-life of about 30 years.
The idea with cesium-137 is that it didn't exist naturally in significant quantities prior to 1945. An airtight container, sealed from the atmosphere prior to 1945, should not contain any.
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).
Nuclear explosions in the atmosphere also changed the isotopic concentration of the atmosphere so much that it's a clear delineation of the "modern era" in almost all radioisotope dating.
Half life is just time until only half of the original amount remains. Double that and it represents the time it takes to halve again. The actual detection threshold would be separate from half life.
Wouldn't that just mean that the detector needs to be increasingly sensitive to detect a late-1940's forgery?
You should also be able to use the presence of the decay daughters as another way to detect forgeries.
Cesium 137 decays to barium 137 which is stable and naturally occurring, so the cesium daughter wouldn't be useful for this case (non-destructive testing of sealed wine bottles).
Ah, inconvenient that it doesn't have a longer chain of gamma emitting daughters.
i want a Catch Me if you Can about this guy -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudy_Kurniawan
It's a pretty wild story. Rudy was also very prolific so there are a lot of his bottles out there in collections and potentially still on the auction market. He had a huge impact on the expensive wine collection trade.
There is a pretty good documentary about this guy and the wine auction: Sour Grapes.
clips from the Sour Grapes documentary https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Sour+Grapes+kurniawan&ia=videos&ia...
Insane to see the government resources used to prosecute this - it's basically play money for rich guys who want to show off.