When diners at Zafferano, a Michelin-starred London restaurant, ordered an £18,000 bottle of 1961 Pétrus wine last month, an unmarked cork raised suspicions that it was a fake, and they sent it back. The restaurant called in specialist wine detectives to investigate the possible scam, but their findings were inconclusive.

Now, new technology looks set to take the guesswork out of wine tasting. Eprovenance, a small American technology company, has developed electronic tags to fit to fine wines as they leave the producers.

A radio frequency identification (RFID) chip similar to those found in the newest Wave and Pay credit cards and Transport for London’s Oyster cards, is attached to the base of the bottle. This holds an encrypted code unique to the individual bottle that is repeated on a tamperproof neck seal. By typing the code in at Eprovenance’s website (www.eprovenance.com), you can confirm not only that a wine is authentic, but also the manner in which it has been treated and stored since being bottled.

This type of drinks digitisation is spreading fast. An Italian manufacturer has designed the Smartcorq, an artificial cork that carries details of a wine’s variety, bottling date and alcohol content. And pub owners worried about drinks being served under the counter might have their eye on the Barvision gadget from an American company called Nuvo Technologies. It is an RFID optic that measures exactly how much alcohol is poured into each cocktail.

Little gives the drinks industry more of a hangover than counterfeit wines, and some experts estimate that about one in 20 vintage bottles stored in private cellars is fake. Counterfeiters either refill old bottles with cheap wine and sell them as genuine, or they reproduce vintage labels using desktop publishing.

David Molyneux-Berry, a wine detective, looked into one single vintage – a Chateau La Fleur Pomerol 1947. The owner of the vineyard told him that a shortage of magnum bottles that year meant only five were made. And yet, he said: “One auction house sold eight bottles of La Fleur 1947 in one auction alone. And 18 bottles have been sold over the last three years.”

Some producers already use coded labels and engraved bottles to deter counterfeiters, but even this isn’t foolproof: the American billionaire William Koch is suing wine dealers over a $100,000 (£50,000) bottle of 1787 Branne-Mouton. His reason? He thinks President Thomas Jefferson’s initials, which are on it, have been applied using modern power tools.

There is no guarantee that even genuine wines are drinkable; if they are exposed to high temperatures during transportation, for instance, they will spoil, and you won’t know until you uncork them. So in addition to the bottle tag, the Eprovenance system positions another RFID tag inside the wine case, to monitor and record temperatures. When this chip is subsequently scanned by a wine merchant or auction house, it is immediately known if the wine has been damaged in transit.

“We put all our effort into making the best possible wine,” says Corinne Mentzelopoulos, owner of the famous Chateau Margaux vineyard. “But then it leaves the chateau and we cannot be certain it’s handled correctly. I’d like to ensure our customers get to enjoy it.”

The new system is undergoing trials with nine Bordeaux chateaux, including several prestigious first-growth vineyards. As for the diners at Zafferano, having rejected one bottle, they promptly ordered another: a magnum of Mouton Rothschild 1945 for the discount price of £20,000.

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