Counterfeiting Wine Piracy
I had no idea that wine could be pirated until I came across an article in Los Angeles Times that discusses wine piracy and how technology can help vintners prevent such dastardly acts. Wine piracy is when people try to sell sub quality wine products passing them off as expensive brand name products by copying their labels and brand names. There have been several cases of counterfeit wines reported in Europe, Asia and China.
Wine Spectator magazine reports that as much as 5 % of the wines sold in secondary markets such as auctions may be counterfeit. According the Los Angeles Times article, there was a recent lawsuit in New York, involving the sales of five bottles of wine, including four said to be owned by Jefferson for $$500,000. This lawsuit reportedly prompted an investigation on the authenticity of the ownership of these wines.
All these has instigated the development of technologies of help prevent wine fraud. Several anti fraud technologies have been investigated including the use of tamper-proof seals and RFID chips. The article states that a few of the high end Napa wineries use a technique developed by Kodak Technology which involves the use of a proprietary marker that can be read only by using a hand held Kodak reader which uses laser technology. Another idea is to put multicolored codes or graphics into labels. Colors and character combinations can be constantly changed to thwart copycats.
Tracking shipments from vintner to customer as well as an easy method to verify authenticity of the wine through software would also help wine piracy. Link to the article is:
http://www.latimes.com/technology/la-fi-wine12jun12,1,2085627.story?coll=la-headlines-technology
June 21st, 2007 at 1:59 am
Almost all of our labels are baked on at Bergin Glass in Napa (right up the street from youse guys
, and they do a very high quality job. Perhaps that kind of craftsmanship can be part of the solution.
Of course, on the day that it is discovered our wine in counterfeited I will have a MAJOR party - because on that day I will know we have arrived!
August 1st, 2007 at 1:07 pm
There’s is more than that when you dig into it. The wine market has a primary side (less expensive) and secondary (vintage). It’s my understanding the primary market has significant fraud loss. But consider the dollar loss in brand. A winery makes a vintage that does not hit the market for 5 years. Two years later some bottles are found to be counterfeit. Now the potential loss is not only the vintage year but also every post year’s due to brand damage.
The key factor is the abilty to fake the label. The government dictates the printed content of the label, ie warning, alcohol content, etc. however does not specify a security material. Any document or label that can be transformed into financial gain is a candidate for fraud so wine labels are no exception. If the Trade Bureau or the wine associations could agree on a secure material it would be difficult to pass fake bottles. In field authentication would be a key factor. Just like the check market layering security features (print and paper based) creates a much more secure document. Just look at the US currency.