'Tequila detector' a Cornell spinoff

• From the Latin American Herald Tribune

MEXICO CITY – A Mexican specialist in environmental agriculture and chemistry has invented a device to detect a tequila’s authenticity and quality and the manner in which it was processed.

In an interview with Efe, Mercedes Guadalupe Lopez Perez, an expert with the National Polytechnic Institute’s Research and Advanced Studies Center in the central city of Irapuato, acknowledged that this technology -- first built in the mid-20th Century at Cornell University in the United States -- has been used extensively with wines but not tequila.

The device is capable of “measuring the potency of the different aromatic compounds in any given product,” making it useful for determining the authenticity of a food or beverage, the researcher said.

Lopez Perez has been working since the mid-1990s on developing the apparatus -- known as a gas chromatography-olfactometry, or GC-O device -- both in the Mexican state of Guanajuato and in Germany and New Zealand.

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