A wee nip that opened the floodgates
Scottish lab finds itself in demand after exposing auctioneer’s £7,600 whisky as fake
SWITZERLAND has a reputation for being expensive but it was a dram that cost £7,600 that drew the attention of Professor Gordon Cook, deputy director of the Scottish Universities Environmental
Research Centre (SUERC) in East Kilbride.
A Chinese millionaire had bought the dram in a hotel in 2017, thinking it was a rare whisky but when it was sent for testing by whisky broker Rare Whisky 101 (RW101), it was found to be fake.
Professor Cook noted the liquid had been tested at Oxford and contacted the brokers to alert them to the fact that the team at SUERC are experts in radiocarbon dating, used to find out the age of whiskies.
While 98% of the work at the centre – which is one of the biggest of its kind in the world – is archaeology, with a little bit of forensic work on human bones for the police, the team can also accurately determine the age of the contents of a bottle of whisky by assessing the amount of Carbon-14 in the liquid.
As Scotland is the home of whisky, Professor Cook felt it was appropriate for a Scottish laboratory to test for fakes. RW101 agreed, and the centre has been working with the company ever since.
As news of the centre’s work has spread, requests from collectors and companies have begun to come in from other parts of the world, including the US, Russia and Belgium.
“The American ones have been mostly bourbons from the mid 19th century and so far they have been genuine,” said Professor Cook, who researched radiocarbon for years before applying his knowledge to whisky testing.
Always with a keen interest in science, he studied for a BSC (Hons) then a PHD at the University of Glasgow. His post-doctoral research was initially in agricultural science and then on a project for Dounreay NPDE to research radionuclides deposited in soil around the reprocessing plant.
From there he took over the Glasgow University radiocarbon laboratory. He moved the laboratory to East Kilbride in 1986 and has been there ever since.
However, while SUERC has recently made headlines because of its work on whisky, Professor Cook explained the technique was not new.
“In the 1960s my line manager in Glasgow had measured radiocarbon in whiskies as part of his PHD research but at that time he required a lot of material to do it,” he said.
“Now we can measure it in tiny fractions of a millilitre because the measurement technology has moved on considerably.
“Nowadays the instrumentation would not fit into a basketball court whereas his would have sat on top of a desk. Ours is a much bigger instrument but it is capable of measuring tiny quantities of radiocarbon. We can take a single cereal grain and date that back 10,000 years with a tiny error. It’s amazing.”