An article in today's Telegraph ("Atomic boffins spot fake wines" by Roger Highfield) reports that the Antique Wine Company (a London-based rare wine merchant) has combined with nuclear scientists in order to develop a sophisticated tool for unmasking counterfeit vintage wines. The technique, developed by French scientists, involves firing beams of charged ions generated by a particle accelerator at the glass bottle (not the wine itself). The spectrum of X-rays that result from the bombardment can help scientists to calculate the ages of the bottle as well as, to some extent, its place of origin. This can be done because the chemical composition of glass used to make bottles changes over time and varies from place to place.