Nov. 18 (Bloomberg) -- The label on the Chateau d’Yquem read 1816, but the number on the cork looked suspiciously like 1949.

It should have read 1849, when the sweet Sauterne was first re-corked, said Stephen Williams, president and chief executive officer of Antique Wine Co. in London. While the date didn’t mean the bottle was a fake, with concern that wines are phony ubiquitous in the high-end market, retailers take extra precaution.

“There was a need for a scientific solution to be 100 percent sure,” said Williams, who discovered a bogus 1982 Dom Perignon and a fake 1947 Cheval Blanc earlier this year.

The Chateau d’Yquem, from one of France’s most-coveted vineyards and selling for more than 10,000 pounds ($16,800), will be sent to the region of France where it originated, Williams said. There it will be examined by researchers using a particle accelerator to test the age and origin of the glass, one of several methods fine-wine sellers in London use to weed out fraudulent wines that sell for thousands of pounds.

Fraud in the $3 billion global wine market is rising, according to the U.K.’s tax authority. Wine investment scams are also up, U.K. prosecutors said. Richard Alderman, the director of the U.K. Serious Fraud Office, said in an interview in September that the agency is getting more wine-fraud referrals.

“We are seeing a move toward high-end wines, the more popular ones,” said Beryl St. James, a spokeswoman for HM Revenue & Customs.

Suspect Bottles

The fraud office has gotten at least seven tips on wine scams in the past six months, SFO spokeswoman Katie Winstanley said in an interview.

Two of the fraud office’s current cases involve boiler-room wine investment fraud, Winstanley said. Boiler-room frauds typically involve aggressive sales campaigns and perpetrators cold-calling prospective investors.

Wine sellers say they’ve noticed an increase in suspicious bottles.

“We are coming across more wines that are suspect,” said Adam Brett-Smith, the managing director of Corney and Barrow Ltd., a London-based wine merchant that holds a royal warrant of appointment to supply wine to the queen and Prince Charles.

Brett-Smith was called into Zafferano, a Michelin starred restaurant in London’s affluent Knightsbridge neighborhood, to authenticate a bottle of 1961 Chateau Petrus last year. The bottle sells for around 18,000 pounds.

Particle Accelerator

Brett-Smith was unable to verify the wine because he and Chateau Petrus only have the means to authenticate bottles dating back to 1964, he said. This is done by comparing the minute differences in the bottles, labels and corks, which change for every Petrus vintage.

The market for fine wine dipped last year, and has continued to rise since then, according to Liv-Ex, a London- based wine index. In the past month, Williams sold two bottles of 1811 Chateau Petrus for $50,000 apiece, he said.

Paranoia among wine buyers is on the rise after last year’s book, “The Billionaire’s Vinegar,” by Benjamin Wallace, detailed the purchase of a possibly fraudulent bottle of 1787 Chateau Lafite Bordeaux, Williams said. Fakes have always been a serious concern, and he hasn’t seen an increase, he said.

“There are around 60 chateaus in Bordeaux, and they’ve made around 100,000 to 400,000 bottles a year over the last 200 years, so it’s more likely than not that when I go into a wine cellar in France that they’re real rather than fake,” Williams said.

Radioactivity

The Antique Wine Co. has sent around 500 bottles to the Centre d’etudes Nucleaires de Bordeaux Gradignan over the past two years to be examined by the particle accelerator, Williams said. The process can authenticate the glass in the bottles using ion-beam analysis to determine the age and history of the bottle, according to the institute.

The center also tests wine by measuring the radioactivity that it emits, Williams said. That can only work on wine where the grapes were grown after 1945, when the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The radioactivity in the soil declined after 1945, and spiked again in 1961, when there was Cold War- era nuclear testing, and again in 1986, when the Chernobyl nuclear reactor failed, he said.

Wine retailers and chateaus are vigilant to weed out fakes, Brett-Smith said. If a customer brings him a bottle to verify, he will only do so if they sign a disclaimer saying that if Corney & Barrow “find the wines to be not correct in our opinion, we will either drink the wines with them there and then, or destroy them,” he said.

‘On Guard’

Romanee-Conti, the French winery, has asked Brett-Smith to destroy or “irrevocably wreck the label” of any bottle Corney & Barrow finds with their name that is a fake, he said.

“Everyone in the trade is constantly on their guard for it,” said James Miles, the director of Liv-Ex, a London-based wine index, who valued the wine market at $3 billion. “There’s a pretty vigorous vetting process, so the traceability is such that any person selling fraudulent wine is going to float to the surface pretty quickly.”

To contact the reporter for this story: Lindsay Fortado in London at lfortado@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: November 17, 2009 19:00 EST