Possibility of wine dating using the natural Pb-210 radioactive isotope

To control the authenticity of an old wine without opening the bottle, we developed a few years ago a method based on the measurement of the 137Cs activity. However, for recent vintages, the 137Cs activity drops to far too low values (most of the time less than 10 mBq/L for a 10-year-old wine) for this method to perform correctly. In this paper we examine the possibility to date wines using the natural radio-element 210Pb which has a 22-year period. This new method we propose implies the opening of the bottle and the follow-on destruction of the wine itself, which means that it can only be used for investigating non-expensive bottles or wine lots where there are multiple bottles of the same provenance. Uncertainties on the resulting 210Pb radioactivity values are large, up to more than 50%, mainly due to local atmospheric variations, which prevents us to carry out precise dating. However it can be used to discriminate between an old wine (pre-1952) and a young wine (past-1990), an information that cannot be obtained with the other techniques based on other isotopes (137Cs, 14C or tritium). •We correlate the measured 210Pb activity in wine to the vintage year.•A precise dating with 210Pb is still difficult.•The method is complementary to the 137Cs technique we previously developed.