“One of the best producers in Burgundy asked us if they could use our labels on all their bottles. Then we can go the extra mile so that when you buy the bottle, say from a distributor in the UK or the US, you can add the bottle to your wallet,” he said. “But now, the idea is that you just take the bottle when you want to drink the wine otherwise it doesn’t make sense because you take the bottle from the full chain of origin.

Gaetano admits that, strictly speaking, the Crurated system does not prevent dedicated fraudsters from transferring the contents of a bottle (if they can avoid the NFC tag on the neck), but says that the reliable -authenticate comes from not allowing where the wine is unknown. because.

If you need to know if a wine is the real deal, then you need a different technology solution. Some wineries use advanced printing techniques for their labels, embedding holograms and printing with invisible inks, but the real prize is an authentication process inside the bottle.

The number of different parameters to test—the age of the wine, its place of origin, its chemical composition—means that the problem is attacked in different ways. A team from the University of Adelaide is able to show that absorbance-transmission and excitation-emission matrix (A-TEEM) spectroscopy, which is a highly sophisticated scan of a sample, can reliably determine the vintage year of a selection of Shiraz wines, which also accurately -account for each of a particular subregion of the Barossa. Valley area.

Similarly, different studies show that nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, which operates along similar lines to an MRI scanner, can detect different levels of deuterium, a hydrogen isotope, and different amino acids in wine, enabling scientists to identify different vintages and types.

A vineyard’s terroir can be “fingerprinted” in terms of the rainfall it experiences, with different areas known to have different chemical rainwater: A 2007 paper showed that analysis of “stable isotopes” in the water used to make wine can accurately distinguish between different regions of California and Oregon.

Perhaps surprisingly, even the most famous experts admit that it may be impossible to detect a fake by smell or taste, no matter how nuanced the palette. But if the human nose fails, a machine can smell the truth. A group of academics from several institutions published a paper in 2023 which showed that by using a method called gas chromatography to analyze the aroma profiles of 80 Bordeaux wines, they could distinguish between vintages from seven specific soils across the left and right banks of the river.