Nuke bomb tests can help to identify fake whisky (New Kerala)
Bottles of vintage whisky can sell for thousands of pounds each, but industry experts claim the market has been flooded with fakes that purport to be several hundred years old but instead contain worthless spirit that was made just a few years ago.
Scientists have found, however, that minute levels of radioactive carbon absorbed by the barley as it grew before it was harvested to make the whisky can betray how old it is.
Researchers at the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit, which is funded by the National Environmental Research Council, discovered that they could pinpoint the date a whisky was made by detecting traces of radioactive particles created by nuclear bomb tests in the 1950s.
They can also use natural background levels of radioactivity to identify whiskies that were made in earlier centuries.
Dr Tom Higham, deputy director of the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit, said: “It is easy to tell if whisky is fake as if it has been produced since the middle of the twentieth century, it has a very distinctive signature.
“With whiskies that are older, we can get a range of dates but we can usually tell which century it came from. The earliest whisky we have dated came from the 1700s and most have been from 19th century.
“So far there have probably been more fakes among the samples we’ve tested than real examples of old whisky.”
A prime example of them discovering a fake was an ‘1856, John McWilliam’ bottling of Macallan
Which was since shown to be fake.
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