WILLIAM KOCH is a seriously rich man. He owns works by Monet, Degas and Dalí. He sailed in the team that won the America’s Cup in 1992, throwing a reported $65 million into the effort. And in the cavernous cellar of his Florida estate reside some of the world’s most expensive wines.

Among them are four hand-blown bottles of Bordeaux dating back to 1784 and 1787, bearing the etching “Th.J”. They were owned by Thomas Jefferson, then Ambassador to France and soon to become President of the United States of America. Jefferson was a true vinophile, reputedly riding through Bordeaux vineyards on horseback procuring the finest vintages for himself and George Washington.

On the basis of this distinguished provenance, Koch forked out half a million dollars for the four bottles. Now the billionaire energy tycoon, who has a doctorate in chemical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has turned to science to determine whether he has been duped.

As reported in this column a year ago Phillipe Hubert, from the University of Bordeaux, has found that wines made after 1945 can be dated because they retain traces of caesium-137, an artificial radioactive isotope produced by nuclear testing.

Hubert tested Koch’s 1787 Château Lafite at a high-security underground laboratory on the French-Italian Alpine border (going deep underground minimises the chances of naturally occurring gamma radiation skewing the results) and concluded that the wine must have been made before 1945 because it lacked caesium-137.

Koch still wasn’t convinced. The next step was to examine the engraved initials; for this, the investigators bought similar bottles and tried to recreate the etchings. Additionally, they sought the help of the Corning Museum of Glass, in New York, and an FBI forensics expert. As the Wall Street Journal reports, these tests have led Koch’s team to believe that the initials were etched with a high-speed diamond drill with a movable head — and they didn’t exist in the 18th century.

This month Koch filed a lawsuit in New York against Hardy Rodenstock, the wine dealer who sold him the bottles after reportedly tracking them down in a bricked-up cellar in Paris in 1985. Suspicions were first raised in 2005 by a museum in Boston that wanted to display the bottles. Rodenstock rejects the claims, saying it is virtually impossible to fake an old wine.

• THE RISING number of women entering science has had an unexpected effect: they are marrying their male colleagues. And because potential lovebirds tend to pore over the same research (before they start poring over each other), couples very often end up in the same laboratory. Now, Mary Ann Mason, graduate dean at the University of California, Berkeley, has called for a study of “science couples”. Dr Mason has previously studied the influence of marriage and parenthood on female academics.

  I fell for Mr Science Notebook when I noticed him in the postgraduate tea room used by all the physics research groups at my college. An experimentalist, he used to saunter in after a morning spent freezing stuff in liquid nitrogen (I still don’t know what, and, 15 years on, it seems a bit late to ask). At least we had the decency to be three floors apart; many other couples whose unions were similarly forged already shared offices. If your own institute isn’t up to much in the lurve stakes, there are always the conferences, meetings and symposiums, where discussing work over a glass of wine with like-minded outsiders is positively encouraged (if only to suss out whether their group has got something big in the works that your own has missed).

  Meanwhile, The Scientist offers helpful advice for newlyweds sharing a workplace. Much of it is common sense: maintain separate identities; negotiate your own career and salary changes; try not to attend the same meetings; don’t lunch together (it leaves nothing to talk about over dinner); women should retain their maiden name, to enhance the chances of remaining “stealth marrieds”; don’t discuss science at the breakfast table (to avoid alienating the children); and — I like this one — never forget to cite your spouse’s publications. Blimey, just imagine the marital fall-out over that one.

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