# Tritium Behavior from Vine to Wine
## 1 Introduction  
Currently, consumers are seeking natural foods and beverages in the market, with their prices incorporating not only the hard work required to obtain them but also the destruction-related dangers faced to achieve an eco-friendly harvest. Higher prices have increased the potential for the use of less expensive synthetic compounds, and the mislabeling of geographical locations has started to become another common way of committing fraud in the industry. Wine, with its worldwide market, is frequently subject to fraud in the wine market in general or collector fraud at the top of the wine market. A bottle of wine from a private collector obtained the price of GBP 105,000 at an auction at Christie's in London in 1985, and numerous historical and contemporary examples of consumption fraud can be found [1]. Special attention has been given to wine. In the EU, several adopted proposals have been applied both to the geographical indication [2] and the methods of analysis [3]. To ensure the correct labeling of the product and to deter the fraudulent use of synthetic compounds, analytical methods incorporating both stable isotopes and radioactive isotopes have been developed. Isotopic ratios are official methods used in the EU since the 1990s for food and beverage authentication, not only in wine, due to their versatility in characterizing the climatic conditions, soil, location, and geology of the soil from which the food ingredients were provided. Nitrogen isotopes are related to agricultural practices. Sulfur isotopes are affected by geology, distance from the sea, or anthropogenic influences, and hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon isotopes are influenced by climatic conditions with geographical variability [4]. If the \({}^{13}\)C/\({}^{12}\)C ratios in the CO\({}_{2}\) of the atmosphere are strongly modified by plant photosynthesis, the radioactive isotope of carbon, radiocarbon, has a small seasonal cycle, which is partly due to the seasonal input of \({}^{14}\)C-enriched stratospheric air into the troposphere and partlyto the seasonal contributions from biogenic and anthropogenic CO\({}_{2}\) fluxes [5]. The \({}^{14}\)C isotope was used to date old wine [6], with the procedure on the increased amount of atmospheric radiocarbon due to nuclear tests of the 1950-1963 period, which regularly decays each year. Unfortunately, it was necessary to obtain measurements of the amount of atmospheric radiocarbon since that period, and the \({}^{14}\)C atmospheric concentration was not a routine measurement in the 1950s. Apart from the lack of information, several factors affect the dating procedure, and only for very old wines does the method have some relevance. Alternative methods were investigated for young wines, with one of the promising methods being the concentration of pinotin A (a reaction product of maldivin 3-O-\(\beta\)-D-glucose and 4-vinylcatechol in Pinotage wine), which seems to be connected to the age of red wine [7]. Another application of radiocarbon is to certify that certain alcoholic beverages are of agricultural or fossil origin. This method assumes that plant growth involves the rapid uptake of primarily atmospheric carbon, and during the manufacturing process, no other phenomenon or carbon fossil source interfered. Radiocarbon atmospheric content has been published for different locations [8; 9], and even in locations where these data were missing, the raw material of the constituent ingredients could be used as reference data to certify the agricultural origin [10; 11]. H and O isotopic data have been linked to their behavior in the water-feeding organic matter of food, so the seasonal variability of temperature and precipitation has specific isotopic fingerprints of the region from which ingredients are provided. The radioactive isotope of hydrogen, tritium, is produced in the upper part of the atmosphere through cosmic rays, mostly present as part of water molecules (HTO) from water vapor or precipitation.