Big Brother Hits Wine Corks

New technology is being used now to track a myriad of information about individual bottles of wine. A microchip is now available to be placed into the synthetic cork of a wine which will send, receive and hold pages of data about the wine inside. An Italian designer has created this RFID cork insert and labeling technology, called SmartCorq, and Arnaldo Caprai is using it on his new Comtemporare Sangiovese. By utilizing radio frequency identification (RFID) technology, a wine's provenance, harvest information, flavor profiles and even suggested food pairings can be inscribed on a rice-sized chip that resides inside the cork. The reader will likely be available at retail stores and various other outlets. Costing about $140 a piece , the reader will not likely be for most consumers to purchase.
Another likely use will be to combat fraud at wine auctions where mislabeling can make a cheap wines sell for many times their value, masking them as expensive collectibles. Collectors will be able to know provenance, temperature extremes and other data that will increase the value of properly handles wines, and exposing poorly handled wines for what they are.
Besides Caprai in Italy, Gallo in the US has been testing RFID since 2004. Many large retailers use pallet attached RFID’s to track loads of many types of product outside of the wine industry. Walmart is a retail industry leader at this time. But in the wine trade, most are waiting to see what the large wineries do. As more and more advantages appear, and the technology becomes affordable., look for more chips to be installed and more data to become available to the consumer.