Prooftag, A New Way To Combat Wine Fraud  Wine fraud has been in
the news lately. First there was the story in the New Yorker on
the infamous Jefferson wines then an article in Slate questioned
just how big a problem wine fraud was. Now Decanter reports on a
new solution for the problem of wine fraud.  A seal called
Prooftag is being used by a few producers. The seal is a small
strip that runs from a metal capsule onto the glass bottle. Once
the seal is broken the capsule is destroyed. The seal has both a
reference number and a plastic square with a unique pattern,
both of which can be doublechecked on the web to assure the
buyer they have bought the real thing.  As the article in
Decanter mentions, the price per bottle is still a bit high
(between â‚¬0.20-â‚¬1 per bottle) and may be putting some
winemakers off but it is expected that as more people adopt the
system the price will go down.