I don't know how many of you are willing to pay $1,000 for a bottle of wine, but I'm sure you would like to know if this 50-year old bottle of Bordeaux is still good before purchasing it. Now, you don't need to open the bottle to discover it. You can get some high-tech help from a wine scanner using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), the same technology used in hospital MRI scans. In "Ultimate wine snob," the Record, from New Jersey, tells us that you can purchase such a scanner for $50,000. Or you can visit the Crystal Springs Country Club, also in New Jersey, where the first NMR wine scanner has been installed, and ask nicely the owner to scan your bottle. If he accepts, you'll know if the wine has turned into vinegar and if the seal or the cork of the bottle have been altered. But it will not tell you if the wine is really good and deserves its high price. Read more.
Here is a description of this wine scanner, which only can handle one bottle.
The scanner, built last summer and installed in the fall, looks like a shining chrome water heater with a series of pipes and tubes protruding from the top that connect to computer and electronic gear, as well as tanks of liquid nitrogen and liquid helium.
Inside, a series of coils are super-cooled, a strong magnetic field is created, and the apparatus sends radio frequencies through the glass that can pick up the levels of acetic acid, or vinegar, and acid aldehyde, another compound that can make wine taste foul. A program tweaked to read the spectroscopy analysis runs on a desktop computer hooked up to the device.
Here is a prototype of the NMR wine scanner (Credit: Wine Scanner, Inc.). It can detect oxidation products or vinegar and determine if the seal and cork of a bottle have been altered or damaged. You'll find more details on the Wine Scanner, Inc. company website.
This wine scanner is based on wine research done at the Augustine Research Group of chemists at the University of California at Davis.
The Record tells us more about this scanner works.
"It's basically an MRI for a wine bottle," says Matt Augustine, the UC-Davis professor who came up with the idea and now acts as operations manager for the [Wine Scanner, Inc.] Morristown start-up.
THE AMERICAN WAY OF LIFE. Even what they eat and drink, these palefaces who don’t know what wine is ... their ugliness ... their pink sausage skin, horrible, they only live because there is penicillin,... the world as an Americanized vacuum ... their fake health, their fake youthfulness ... the way they use cosmetics even on corpses, their whole pornographic attitude to death.
—Max Frisch (1911–1991)
Scans show distinct peaks for certain elements and compounds in the wine and can detect acetic acid at less than one-tenth the amount that would spoil wine, Augustine says.
Eugene Mulvihill, the New Jersey developer who licensed the technology from UC-Davis and built the first scanner in his Crystal Springs Country Club to check his multimillion-dollar wine cellar, thinks that other people might be interested in this $50,000 wine scanner.
Mulvihill believes auction houses or people with large private collections might want to use his scanner. "You're not talking an $8 bottle of wine; you're talking a $1,000 bottle of wine, and you want it to be perfect," said Mulvihill, who has demonstrated the machine's findings at tastings in Manhattan.
It's not yet clear whether a potential market exists for the wine scanner. Mulvihill's hopeful but says he's not in a rush.
If you're interested by the research work behind this wine scanner, a paper has been published by the Journal of Magnetic Resonance (Volume 161, Issue 1, Pages 91-98, March 2003) under the name "Using NMR to study full intact wine bottles."
Here is a link to the abstract.
A nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) probe and spectrometer capable of investigating full intact wine bottles is described and used to study a series of Cabernet Sauvignons with high resolution 1H NMR spectroscopy. Selected examples of full bottle 13C NMR spectra are also provided. The application of this full bottle NMR method to the measurement of acetic acid content, the detection of complex sugars, phenols, and trace elements in wine is discussed.
And in the full paper (PDF format, 8 pages, 407 KB), you'll find a diagram of the experimental setup used to obtain the NMR spectrum of full intact wine bottles.
Neither do men put new wine into old bottles: else the bottles break, and the wine runneth out, and the bottles perish: but they put new wine into new bottles, and both are preserved.
—Bible: New Testament Jesus, in Matthew, 9:17.
Finally, if you happen to visit the Crystal Springs Country Club and its Restaurant Latour, you'll be able to know if one of its 50 vintages of Chateau Latour is still good before pocketing $2,000 or more. Enjoy your dinner!
Sources: Martha McKay, The Record, Hackensack, New Jersey, May 12, 2005; and various websites
Related stories can be found in the following categories.
Chemistry
Food
Innovation
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