Researchers create AI tool with a nose for fraudulent wine

Fraudsters who pass off ropey plonk as a high-end tipple may soon have artificial intelligence on their case; scientists have trained an algorithm to trace wines to their origins based on routine chemical analyses. Researchers used machine learning to distinguish wines based on subtle differences in the concentrations of scores of compounds, allowing them to track the wines back not only to a particular vine-growing region, but to the estate where the wine was made. "There's a lot of wine fraud around with people making up some crap in their garage, printing off labels, and selling it for thousands of dollars," said Prof Alexandre Pouget at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. "We show for the first time that we have enough sensitivity with our chemical techniques to tell the difference." To train the program, the scientists turned to gas chromatography, which had been used to analyse 80 wines harvested over 12 years from seven different estates in the Bordeaux region of France.