Skeptical of both parties’ tests, Elroy sought out Philippe Hubert, a French physicist who had devised a method of testing the age of wine without opening the bottle. Hubert uses low-frequency gamma rays to detect the presence of the radioactive isotope cesium 137. Unlike carbon 14, cesium 137 is not naturally occurring; it is a direct result of nuclear fallout. A wine bottled before the advent of atmospheric nuclear testing contains no cesium 137, so the test yields no results for older wines. But if a wine does contain cesium 137 the short half-life of the isotope—thirty years—allows Hubert to make a more precise estimate of its age.
Elroy flew to France, with the Jefferson bottles packed in two bulletproof, impact-resistant cases, which he carried as hand luggage. (He had obtained a carnet, a sort of passport for objects, so that he would not have to pay any duties while crossing borders with a half million dollars’ worth of wine. When airport security scrutinized the bottles between flights at Heathrow, Elroy deadpanned, “You just can’t get a good bottle of wine on the airplane.”)
The lab where Hubert and Elroy tested the wine is under a mile-high stretch of the Alps on the French-Italian border. The bottles were placed into a detector that was surrounded by ten inches of lead and were subjected to a week of tests.
Elroy was confident by now that he and his investigators were closing in on Rodenstock. “With the evidence I’m seeing from Monticello, combined with what I’m seeing from Germany, I’m ninety-nine-per-cent sure this guy is a fraud,” he recalled. When Hubert completed the tests, however, he identified no cesium 137 in the bottles. “I don’t know whether it’s 1783 or 1943,” Hubert told Elroy. But the wine predated the atomic age.
“I can’t tell you how disappointing it was,” Elroy told me. “I’ve got the historical evidence, but if we’re going to do this criminally there’s got to be more than that. I’ve got to have some kind of scientific or other evidence, or it’s not going to be prosecutable.”