WineFraud
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New Korean RFID device claims to help prevent wine fraud
It's sorta unclear to us exactly how this new flavor of RFID tags is going to prevent wine fraud, but nonetheless, Sontec, a Korean RFID manufacturer is claiming as much. As we noted only a few weeks ago, wine fraud is big business, and every wine and winery from Chateauneuf-du-Pape to Penfolds surely would want a way to prevent their label's image from being tarnished. Sontec's new RFID, which operates at 900MHz, apparently has a range of up to three meters and will include the origin, date of production and distribution channel of the wine. Presumably if a wine (or other spirits) was diluted and still had this tag on it, no one would be the wiser, but given how secure RFID is, it's not like nefarious faux-wine peddlers would even really have to stoop to those means.
NEC's winebot detects fraudulent bottles
Apparently wine fraud is big business, with certain less-than-reputable vineyards watering down their Cabernet with a little Merlot, for instance, or even filling their supposedly boutique bottles with some off-the-shelf Manischewitz. Well the engineers / wine connoisseurs over at NEC have had enough, so they've invented a wine-tasting "robot" that can distinguish between 30 distinct varieties using only a five-milliliter sample. We've already seen NEC use infrared light in a food-tasting bot, and now they've taken a similar approach with this new device -- about twice the size of a three-liter wine box (mmm...box o' wine) -- which uses LEDs to fire infrared light at a sample and an array of photodiodes to interpret the resulting reflection. Until they can boost its recognition abilities to include many more varieties of wine (about 1,000, in fact), though, this project is little more than an academic exercise -- meaning you'll still need to bring your corkscrew to the liquor store if you want to ensure that you're getting a quality product.
