![]() Photo by Michael Pravikoff Why it matters: This way, all radiation emitting from the wine is captured, rather than just from one side of the bottle. The wine is concentrated into ash and placed in the middle of the detector, which is shielded with lead. Otherwise it would have been impossible to see measure any kind of level,” Pravikoff said.Ĭalifornia wines tested in this study have such low cesium-137 levels, the researchers had to use a special detector. “We can see because we have developed instruments which are very sensitive. The radiation levels in the red wines are barely above “background” - or the low amount of radiation seen in French wines since the 1990s, after radiation from Chernobyl became undetectable in European wines. In a rosé from the same vineyard, there wasn’t much of a variation over the same period of time. In Cabernet Sauvignon from two different vineyards, the physicists found the radiation levels doubled in 2011 and remained higher than usual in 2012 through 2015. With this concentrated wine placed in a small tube and surrounded by a gamma ray detector, the physicists were able to see a small amount of radiation. So instead of using their regular method, they had to remove the wine from the bottles, boil it until all the liquid evaporated and reduce it to ash. What the physicists found:Īt first, when the they tested Napa Valley wine from 2008 to 2015, the physicists did not detect any radiation. ![]() In a 2009 study by Pravikoff and Hubert, more than half of the wines tested were determined to be fake when measurable amounts of cesium-137 were found in the wine. But, if the wine is labeled pre-1950, like many extremely expensive wines dating back to the 1700s, absolutely no radiation should be detected. Hubert and Pravikoff subsequently tested dozens of wines certified to be genuine, and were able to correlate the level of radiation with the year the wine was made.īecause radiation levels went up and down as nuclear tests were done in the 1950s and 1960s, they can’t tell the exact year. Gamma rays from radioactive cesium-137 in the wine are quantified by the detector, giving researchers an approximate year the wine was made. Luckily, the process of glassmaking evaporates any cesium from bottle glass, so all the radiation must come from the wine itself.Īn unopened bottle of wine sits next to a germanium detector. Shielded from cosmic rays and other forms of radiation in an lab built specifically for low-level radiation measurements, Hubert was able to detect gamma rays from cesium-137. “So every year the amount of cesium-137 released in the atmosphere is different.” It’s produced only through atom bomb testing in the atmosphere or through the incidents like Chernobyl or Fukushima,” Pravikoff said. The method involved looking at gamma rays emitted by cesium-137, a radioactive element that first appeared on Earth in 1952. More than 20 years ago, Hubert pioneered a non-invasive method to confirm the approximate vintage of a wine. ![]() Wines from 1952 to the 1970s, for example, have much higher radiation levels due to above ground nuclear testing.Īs for Fukushima, other studies have found increased levels of radiation in the ocean and marine life off the Pacific coast of North America after the incident.īut this study is the first to examine how the cloud of atmospheric radiation traveled across the ocean to affect grapes in the Napa Valley. Radiation detection has been used for decades as a way to verify the age, or vintage, of a wine. The amount of radiation present in all the wine tested by their lab is too small to harm a person’s health.
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