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“One of the best producers in Burgundy asked us if they could use our labels on all their bottles. Then we can create an extra step so that when you buy the bottle, say from the distributor in the UK or the US, you can add the bottle to your wallet,” he says. “But now, the idea is that Take out the bottle only when you want to drink the wine. Otherwise, there is no point because you are removing the bottle from the perfect chain of provenance.”
Gaetano admits that, strictly speaking, Cruated’s system doesn’t stop dedicated fraudsters from changing the contents of a bottle (if they can bypass the NFC tag on the neck), but he says that reliable authentication comes from never allowing the contents to be unknown. whereabouts of the wine. for.
If you need to determine if a wine is authentic, you will need a completely different technological solution. Some wineries have employed advanced printing techniques for their labels, incorporating holograms and printing with invisible inks, but the real prize is a process of authenticating what’s inside the bottle.
The number of different parameters to be analyzed (the age of the wine, its place of origin, its chemical composition) means that the problem has been attacked in different ways. A team from the University of Adelaide was able to demonstrate that absorbance-transmission and excitation-emission matrix spectroscopy (A-TEEM), essentially a very sophisticated scan of a sample, could reliably determine the vintage year of a selection of Shiraz wines, also accurately associating each with a particular sub-region of the Barossa. Valley area.
Likewise, different studies have shown that nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, which works similarly to an MRI scanner, can detect different levels of deuterium, an isotope of hydrogen, and different amino acids in wine, allowing scientists to identify different vintages and types.
A vineyard’s terroir can be “fingerprinted” in terms of the rainfall it experiences, and different areas are known to have chemically different rainwater: 2007 article showed that analysis of “stable isotopes” within the water used to make wine could accurately distinguish between different regions of California and Oregon.
Perhaps surprisingly, even the most renowned experts acknowledge that it may be impossible to detect a fake by smell or taste, no matter how nuanced the palette. But where humanity’s nose is defeated, a machine can still sniff out the truth. A team of academics from multiple institutions published a paper in 2023 which showed that by using a method called gas chromatography to analyze the aromatic profiles of 80 Bordeaux wines, they could distinguish between vintages from seven particular estates on the left and right banks of the river.
