Forensic Science and Wine Fingerprinting, pt. 2
Ξ February 12th, 2009 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Uncategorized |
In this, the concluding portion of my interview with Prof. John Watling of the Centre of Forensic Science at the University of Western Australia, he provides many more fascinating insights into his work and that of his group.
Forensics has come further along than any fiction writer can imagine. Indeed, not only effective in determining the provenance of wines, Prof Watling highlights the bewildering range of precise applications he and his forensics group explore. It becomes quite clear that with the proper, refined technique, traces of the hand of man may be found on whatever he touches, a discernible impress of time and place may be read on whatever he makes or grows. And so, too, does the earth and life itself retain a complete history of sorts nested in their natural processes. Forensics, as practiced by Prof. Watling and his group, is at the intersection of a multitude of complimentary sciences that, along with their own technological innovations, can provide powerful insight into any object or substance put before them.
Part 1 may be found here
Admin In the wine world perception is of great moment. Do you think that a winery would be reluctant to release specific information about the elemental fingerprint of its wines, for example, of the concentrations of arsenic, lead and mercury?
John Watling I think that any commercial winery that has any of those trace elements present in materials at levels considered hazardous would want to know that. We’re dealing predominantly with the indicative trace metals in concentrations in the parts per billion, and sometimes down as far as parts per trillion. We’re not dealing with high levels, we’re not dealing with anything that could be considered dangerous to health.
I understand. It is a question of perceptions. You would be surprised, well, perhapswouldn’t, at the extraordinary environmental/health claims made in the blogosphere…
JW Of course. But when we work with a vineyard we are saying to them that we are not releasing their fingerprints to anybody apart from them unless they give us written permission so to do. Now, some of these vineyards are saying to us, “well, look, we would very much like to have it recognized on our bottles that this wine has been fingerprinted. This really is a wine we know the provenance of, it’s better than appellation control because we can come back to the vineyard of choice, and we’d like to know that this is the case.”
And one of them has even suggested that they actually have a fingerprint of the metal composition of the wines on the bottle. It’s something they are considering as far as a marketing tool is concerned.
Quite interesting. Now, what is done in the case of a blend, say, sourced from multiple vineyards in multiple regions?
JW (laughs) For the moment, quite seriously, this technique, to get it to this level, is in its infancy. What we are doing at the moment is unblended wines. Cabernets and Merlots from the same vineyard are similar, but when you blend them they take on the composition of the proportion of one to the other. So we’re looking at material that is a straight Cabernet, a straight Merlot, a straight whatever the unblended material is as far as varietal is concerned. We haven’t got to mixtures yet. I’ll come back to this in a moment. Let me just qualify this…
Sometimes wines are blended from all over the place, and you lose the fingerprint. But under those circumstances most of those wines are relatively cheap sorts of table wines people are not interested [in fingerprinting]. What people are interested in is the relatively expensive to certainly expensive wines. They are very carefully protected. The purpose of this is to say that though there may be a paper trail here, but the paper trail is wrong or the paper trail is right.
We recently had a situation here, and I don’t want to go into this in huge detail, but a cargo has come into Australia, a cargo of wines from another country, with labels [claiming] Australian origin. We’ve been able to put those wines back to the [real] country of origin. They are not Australian wines.
If we get a blended wine we can take the blended wine that says, its label says, it is from country vineyard A, we can go to vineyard A, get a sample of the wine vineyard A is producing and compare those two fingerprints. If they match then it’s correct, if they don’t match then that’s not correct. So, in a way saying that you can’t mix blends and you can’t mix varietals and produce a wine you can’t trace back is wrong because the bottle will have the information to say which vineyard it comes from, which years it is, etc. etc. We can then go back to the vineyard and look at the equivalent brand and match that fingerprint retrospectively.
It’s rather like, if you imagine you have a normal, classical fingerprint, the fingerprints from the fingers of a hand. When you get a new kid on the block who’s a new crook, he’s in no data base. You have to catch him first, take his fingerprints, then we he does something else his fingerprints are on record. But until he does a crime his fingerprints are not on record, all you have is a fingerprint. It’s the same with wines.
Until we’ve have a situation where we can actually establish a fingerprint data base for all the wines for a particular area, or in a country, we can’t go back with a wine that isn’t in our data base and say it didn’t come from there. What we can do is go back to the vineyard with the wine in the bottle that says it came from this particular vineyard and say, ‘we believe this wine is not kosher. Can we have a sample of your wine for comparative purposes?’ And there, under those circumstances, they come up and say ‘yes, that’s great’, because they don’t want wines that are not theirs sold as if they are theirs. That could lead to a bad reputation.
Given the sample of wine it is cross compared and a determination is made as to its correct provenance. But if the sample is not given then it will not exist in our data base, and we won’t know its provenance.
That is essentially fingerprinting in the classical sense, like the fingerprints on a hand.
Now, I can understand the point of view of a winery, a government, or a police agency with respect to the importance of wine fingerprinting, but what if you had a very wealthy Hong Kong businessman who had spent enormous amounts of money collecting the finest Bordeaux and Burgundy, could he make an appeal to your organization for a correct determination of provenance?
JW Absolutely!
So it works both ways: from the consumers point of view and a winery’s point of view. Both can benefit.
JW Absolutely. We were in negotiations with a gentleman in California who apparently has an expensive cellar, a big collection of fine wines, to come over and work with him on his cellar, and to establish this technique in America. Then, unfortunately, I believe he lost a significant amount of money in the financial downturn and it all went pear-shaped. We didn’t actually go. This is recently, over the last three, four months.
Exactly your question, if we have international connoisseurs that have a cellar, that wish to know whether their wine came from a particular vineyard, we can work directly with them to establish whether it did of didn’t.
How do you fingerprint a vintage wine that is, say, from 1980 unless you also have a soil sample from the same time frame from the associated vineyard?
JW We have undertaken work over a period of time for some of our wines and have found that the fingerprint of a specific wine from a specific vineyard does not change that much over time. Obviously if the vines have been ripped out and replanted I cannot say this would hold or if viticulture practices have changed, but in studies where we have taken wines over a 30 year period there is not much difference in the elemental fingerprint.
What is your procedure for the extraction of a sample from an valuable bottle of wine? Can it be done in a comparatively non-invasive manner?
JW Two approaches here. We use an extremely small catheter to remove about 100microliters of solution (wine) and use a micro sampling and analysis protocol to obtain the fingerprint. We realise that this is a “breach” of the bottle but in order to analyze something you have to have something to analyze and we need to take a sample. Also if several case have been bought, sampling a single sample and getting an inappropriate signature will allow us to make specific suggestions. And one could also say, if you get the correct signature then probably the whole consignment is OK.
However, we also fingerprint the glass and we have techniques that will tell us the provenance of glass and we can distinguish bottles that have been made approximately one hour apart from each other. We are trying to work with collectors to fingerprint empty bottles associated with a specific year and vineyard so that we can establish provenance of the bottle. We can analyze the glass with absolutely not effect on the wine.
Taking a step back, could you say a bit more about the mechanism of a plant’s uptake of metals.
JW Let me beg to point out that I am not a soil scientist. But I do have a professor of soil science from our university on this project working with us. Although I’m not a soil scientist but a chemist in my own right, I can’t expect people to listen to what I say about soil science and take it seriously. However, we do have the head of soil science on our research group, Zed Rengel, he can, of course, discuss this in absolute detail.
We’re all very informal here.
About the role of microorganisms and the health of the soil generally. I suppose you’ve already answered this question in one way because of the soil samples you take at various levels or depths. But do you think that higher concentrations of microorganisms might have an affect, play some role, on the availability of elements for a vine to take up?
JW I think that there’s a lot that is not known as to what happens between the root, the plant and the microorganisms in the soil. There’s a heck of a lot not known about that still. We know certain microorganisms obviously have to be present for things like nitrogen uptake. There are certain other microorganisms that have to be present, in association with the roots, to facilitate the uptake of metals. There are a lot of chemicals in the plant that actually reject or promote the uptake of metals as well. It’s a very, very complicated system.
The microbiologists, the plant biologists are the people that work on those areas. We’re not trying to establish what happens and why. We’re trying to establish what the profiles in the soil are and what are the profiles in the roots, in the stems, in the leaves, in the sap and in the grapes, to see if we can relate those together. And we’ve actually had some success in relating them. How it gets from A to B is still difficult to understand from a lot of the microbiologists’, the plant biologists’ points of view.
We have the mechanism now of looking at very, very small areas. We are capable of getting concentrations in the parts per billion and below region for about 60 analytes. So we can really do almost in vivo analysis of the material that is moving through the plant at any particular time. And it is because of this that we can now start developing these techniques in a far more sophisticated way.
How does your particular approach differ from other researchers? For example, in the recent Decanter story about your work someone posted a comment referring to a gentleman by the name of Donato Lanati. The commenter referred to him, in part, as a researcher. How does your research differ from his?
JW He hasn’t done this at all. He’s a plant biologist but he hasn’t done this kind of work at all. So I think there is a little bit of misunderstanding of this. To the lady who wrote in and said he’d been doing this sort of work before: terribly sorry. We pulled his papers out of the research journals. We’ve looked at what he’s done and how he’s done it, it is not anything to do with the kind of stuff that we’re doing. He hasn’t published a single thing on it. And his background is not in metals and plants.
That isn’t to say that other people aren’t doing this work. We’re not chemical geniuses. We’re fairly good but we wouldn’t claim to be anything like that. But the kind of levels of metals we’re looking at are possible because we have developed the instrumentation that allows us to do that. And that is pretty damn good! It’s better than many, many places in the world for detection and analytical accuracy. Areas that we are associated with for such detection levels and analytical accuracy we are not actually dealing with plants but things like microprocessors in the semiconductor industry, stuff like that.
Could you tell me something of your commercial venture and how that works within the Australian university system?
JW Yes. Essentially, in Australia, unlike many other countries in the world, we do not have a primary industry that produces for the forensics industry. Under those circumstances grants from the government of Australia primarily come when you can get industry support for a research initiative. The government likes to think, well, if we put some money into this research then industry in Australia will benefit. The only industry that will benefit from our research in forensic science is the police. The government pays the police anyway, so the police cannot come with us and co-sponsor research applications. So we have to go find money from somewhere else to do our own research, to fund our research. And in order to do this we have to be very entrepreneurial. And within the university environment it’s pretty much impossible to be entrepreneurial because everything takes six months to run through various committees.
So what the university has allowed us to do is establish a company ourselves, not just for wine; we do a lot of work, we do metallurgy work, we do mineral extractions, many fields in which we do high-end chemistry. When people actually have a problem in chemistry that they can’t get anybody to solve, they come to us.
We do high-end chemistry, very sophisticated chemistry. We don’t interfere with the routine chemical laboratories in the country. We are problem solvers, and we take things from start to finish. We don’t just produce analyses. Now, under that regime we go out and market ourselves as the company called TSW Analytical. Now, the profits that we make doing that kind of work are plowed back into the company. We buy new equipment, we buy sophisticated equipment that, obviously, the university can’t afford. We’re just starting up a facility for dating zircons, for mineral exploration and for looking for diamonds. We range quite considerably in the chemical fields that we are dealing with.
The university can’t afford it, the government doesn’t give it to us, they don’t have the money. We grow our facilities like this and teach the students in the university on this equipment. So the university allows us to exist, encourages us to exist, because they know they’re going to get current scientific thinking, scientists that are in the field who can teach practically because they’ve got personal experience, and a whole range of equipment and data that comes into the university they wouldn’t get otherwise. So it’s a symbiotic relationship with the university. It’s quite a novel way of dealing with it.
Absolutely fascinating. My mind is buzzing! I wish I could attend your classes, quite frankly!
JW (laughing) We belong to the group that developed gold and diamond fingerprinting. We can actually take your gold back to which mine it came from and your diamonds to which mine it came from. We range quite considerably in the kind of work we do. We’re fairly unique!
I work fairly long hours and have got some good ideas sometimes, but I have a fantastic team of scientists around me and we all work pretty hard and enjoy what we’re doing. As long as it’s fun it doesn’t matter how hard we work.
It’s been an enormous pleasure to have spoken with you, John.
JW You’re welcome, Ken. Good luck with the article. Take care.
Admin
