With the aim to identify fake wines out of vintage wines, a rare wine merchant has joined hands with the nuclear scientists to develop a 21st century tool.

A French scientist has developed a technique for the British Wine expert, in which bottles are zapped with the beams of charged ions which are generated by a particle accelerator.

The beams, which are directed at the glass of the bottle, is X-rayed through telltale spectrum that is created from the bombardment. This process helps the scientists to determine as to how old the bottles are, and also guess the place of their origin.

Dr Hervé Guégan, a researcher at the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Bordeaux, where the university also took part in the studies, explained, “We compare the suspect bottles with those that we know come from the chateaux.”

The method is quite strong and authentic according to him, as he explains, “the chemical composition of glass used to make bottles changed over time and was different from place to place.”

Every year, the Antique Wine Company in London, handles more than 10,000 bottles of exotic wines, and thus the technology to recognize fake bottles could help them immensely. That’s why they asked Dr Guégan's Centre for Nuclear Studies to develop it.

Stephen Williams, the company’s managing director, said, “We sell bottles every day for between $2,000 and $10,000. An exceptional grand cru can fetch up to $100,000 dollars (€70,000). At these prices, counterfeiting is something we have to be very diligent about.”

So it seems that if his technology works and becomes successful, then surely it would be a child’s play to recognize original and exotic wine bottles from the fake ones.