Evaluating Your Vino

Reported January 2006

DAVIS, Calif. (Ivanhoe Broadcast News) -- If you are thinking about buying some good wine, you may want to consider giving the bottle an MRI first.

Leah Knight collects wine. She knows a bad cork lets in too much oxygen, turning wine to vinegar, but until now, the only way to know if a bottle was bad was to open it, and opening a bad bottle of wine is very disappointing.

Matthew Augustine, Ph.D., a chemist from the University of California, Davis, says he is not a wine connoisseur. Yet, he came up with an invention for wine lovers; a wine scanner that can tell if a bottle of wine is good without ever opening it. The bottle is put into a powerful magnet, then, it's bathed with radio waves -- an MRI for wine.

"Different chemical compounds absorb difference frequencies of radio waves," Matthew says. Computers analyze the data and detect chemicals that are bad for wine. Tiny bumps in a line graph help the group of chemists decipher which bottles are bad and which are ready to drink.

A bottle of 1888 Chateau la Tour survived two world wars and crossed the Atlantic Ocean, but the wine scanner shows it's no worse for the wear. Matthew says, "This test is 100-percent accurate."

According to Matthew this test is also useful on wines already in your cellar. In fact the wine scanner tells the status of a bottle of wine, meaning owners can know when to savor a bottle and when to serve it in the salad.

Leah says, "If you can sort-of say, 'Oh, great. We can keep this for a few years,' or, 'We need to drink this now or in a month or two,' that would be the key."

An estimated 5 percent to 10 percent of all red wines are bad. Besides oxidation, a moldy cork can also ruin wine. The developers of the wine scanner expect to have technology to detect that within a few months and plan to sell wine scanner franchises. It will cost $25 to have a bottle tested.

Click here to Go Inside This Science or contact:

Wine Scanner, Inc.
355 Madison Avenue
Morristown, NJ 07960
(530) 219-2512

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