Clare Valley grapegrower David Travers and winemaker Jeff Grosset have developed cloud-based software to improve the speed and simplicity of collecting Wine Australia’s Label Integrity Program (LIP) information during vintage.
Called Entrust, the software can work in tandem with a new digital screwcap, called Enseal, which the pair have also developed. Both products are in beta testing and winemakers are being encouraged to join the free use trials.
Entrust and Enseal are currently being tested by Wine Australia as a potential cloud-solution allowing remote inspection of the LIP.
Under the LIP, growers and winemakers are required (by law) to collect and retain a range of production information including: the grower’s name and address, the winery name and address, the date the grapes are supplied, the quantity, vintage, variety and the Geographical Indication (GI). Entrust allows the winery to centralise regularly used information, such as vineyards and vessels, reducing the duplication of recording transfers on carbon paper, note pads, whiteboards and emails. Other repeatedly used information, such as a grower’s name, grape variety and GI can be automatically sent to a grower’s smart phone app for harvest, while other LIP data – including location, harvest date and time – are captured automatically through the phone’s geolocation services.
Because the information is immutable (unable to be changed) it can be provided as a trusted digital record, such as to prove a label’s integrity. Enseal completes the digital LIP, by attaching this digital information to a chip in the screwcap.
In the 2020 vintage, 15 Clare Valley wine companies participated in the Entrust alpha trial. Five of them – Kilikanoon, Pikes, Taylors, Grosset and Mt Horrocks – collected sufficient data to have one riesling used for the Wine Australia LIP test.
Mr Travers, a fifth-generation sheep and wheat farmer, says the extension of Entrust beyond wine is an important beta goal.
‘In a post-COVID-19 environment, the future critical infrastructure for Australian primary producers will be universal multi-commodity digital assets, like large datasets, real time analytics, supply chain visibility and distributed payment and financing systems.’
He is encouraging wine companies to create their own free Entrust beta account and be involved in the pre-vintage testing. Various free features include a winemaking dashboard displaying vineyards, stocks on hand (SOH) and winemaking steps are already included.
Mr Grosset says the capacity to create individual bottle serialisation in a high-speed bottling process is currently being tested and will be added to the beta trial in the coming months.
‘Importantly, Entrust allows a wine’s authenticity, provenance and integrity to be assured; and its potential application goes way beyond wine’, he says.
He says Enseal uses near field communication (NFC) compliant ‘Tag Tamper’ technology that can be read by most smart phones – each cap has its own unchangeable serial number – allowing the provenance of each bottle to be confirmed, as well as the integrity of the seal, as the electronic signature changes when the cap is opened.
Entrust, operates on Hedera Hashgraph an enterprise-grade distributed ledger. Hedera is a fast, decentralised public network that offers better security than first-generation blockchain consensus mechanisms. Hedera is owned by some of the world’s largest technology companies including Google, IBM, Boeing and LG.
Modern mobile phones, with in-built GPS geolocation, will allow producers to more simply reduce compliance costs (such as meeting their Wine Australia LIP obligations) and time and prevent some types of supply chain fraud.