Issue link: http://winesandvines.uberflip.com/i/144804
TECHNOLOGY winery production and packaging, along with a trademarked "Bubble Seal"—a translucent polymer seal or stick-on label with a unique configuration of bubbles—for authentication and anti-counterfeiting. The Bubble Seal film reveals attempts to open the bottle, showing tearing, de-lamination and alteration of its colored background if moved. Depending on quantity, the Bubble Seal can be applied manually or with a standard labeling head. If the customer also uses the ProofTag software suite, unique characteristics, information about the wine for its consumers and consumer feedback about the wine are capabilities that can be added to each Bubble Seal for the winery. At Comtes von Neipperg Vineyards in St. Emilion, France, vintner Stephan von Neipperg (who is also vice president of the Union of Bordeaux Grands Crus) decided in 2006 to equip his bottling lines with unit-tracing capability. Today, each label for Château Canon La Gaffelière and La Mondotte is serialized with a 2D datamatrix code. "Each bottle cap receives a Bubble Tag, whose uniqueness and authenticity are easily verifiable by the consumer," von Neipperg reports. "This is a proactive approach, which contributes to the recognition and the security of our products." The code enables complete supply chain tracing: from the assemblage vat up to the destination address. Customers can verify a wine's authenticity by entering the bottle's code on the winery website, where a page explains the tags and how to scan a QR code with a mobile device for wine information. Blankiet Estates in Yountville, Calif., was the first winery to implement the Bubble Seal security solution in California. Developed in partnership with Neenah Paper (Neenah, Wis.), a new FiberTag technology from ProofTag records a single visible fingerprint made of fibers in a dedicated area. The random dispersion of visible colored fibers into the paper is a simple and effective chaometric element (a visible and measurable chaotic security item), directly integrated into the paper at the production phase. Each authentication label produced with Neenah Secure paper is printed with a unique identifier such as a QR, 2D or alphanumeric code. The code is matched with the random embedded fiber image, and the end user can verify the authenticity of the code and corresponding fiber image with a smartphone or other verification device along the supply chain. The fiber image and code are recorded at printing and stored for instant recall and comparison. Detecting diversion iProof, based in Coral Gables, Fla., provides product authentication for clients in luxury goods, medical supplies, clothing and other industries including wine production. Erik Harvey, iProof's project manager in Napa, Calif., explained that iProof uses an eight-character code that authenticates a wine through the application of an RFID tag or QR code that can be read by most mobile devices. "It's important to make the consumer a part of the whole brand-protection process," Harvey said, "to give them reassurance that the product is authentic." In addition, iProof provides track-and-trace capability to show where the product is in the marketplace and to protect against parallel markets. At the packaging stage, a winery can reference via the iProof markers where a particular shipment is going. If bottles from that shipment appear in other markets and are scanned, the producer will know they were 40 W in e s & V i ne s AU G U ST 20 13