Clare Valley wineries trial world-leading technology
Vintage is now in full swing in the Clare Valley and a dozen wineries are trialling ground-breaking new blockchain technology.
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The largest blockchain wine provenance trial in the world has kicked off in the Clare Valley, with about 100 vineyards from 12 wine companies taking part.
Winners of last year’s Premier’s Blockchain Innovation Challenge, Clare Valley grapegrower David Travers and winemaker Jeff Grosset have not yet released the VinoTrust brand to the market but trial participants are getting early, hands-on experience with the software.
VinoTrust combines new technology, such as blockchain, IoT, cloud and mobile, to provide a real time verifiable system where records are geolocated, timestamped and immutable.
Every stage of the supply chain is verified – from harvest, to the weighbridge, winemaking and bottling – ensuring provenance and authenticity.
Each of the trial participants have received an Android smartphone pre-loaded with the VinoTrust app and access to the VinoTrust winery management system, as well support and backup.
One of the trial participants, Kilikanoon winemaker Kirby Graudins has being using VinoTrust at the Clare winery for two weeks.
“We’re in full swing with vintage, most of our whites are in-house and the reds starting to come through,” he said.
“I’ve found VinoTrust very user-friendly, even though it’s obviously still very much in the infancy stage. There’s nothing that hard or difficult about using it.”
Mr Graudins, who previously worked as a label integrity auditor with Wine Australia, believes it’s important this type of technology is adopted by industry.
“There’s a couple of reasons why I think it’s hugely important for the industry,” he said.
“The first is to prevent copycat labelling and what’s basically ‘fake’ wine hitting the market, which has been a big thing in China. Australian wineries have been doing a lot of legwork in China in particular, so it would be devastating to have that work taken away by fake wine.
“Secondly, as a former label integrity auditor, I know that one of the hardest things to prove was that fruit was picked from where you said it was. At the moment, it’s all recorded by a series of paperwork, which can obviously be edited. Having a program that puts a GPS time stamp on that harvest action, proves that step of the process.”
Mr Graudins said another key aspect to the technology was giving consumers confidence in the product they’re buying.
Other wineries taking part in the trial include Jim Barry, Bourke & Travers, Casella, Grosset, Mt Horrocks, Kirrihill, Pikes, Paulett, Taylors, Tim Adams and Vanguardist.
With a shorter harvest expected in the Clare Valley this year, due to a tough season, Mr Travers said it should not be long before there was a good data set available from the trial.
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“We’ll have a significant volume of information to then do some analysis on the user experience,” he said.
Blockchain Australia deputy chairman Rob Allen, who has been involved with the development of VinoTrust, said one of the best aspects to the project was that it was being driven by the wine industry.
“This is just the start of a long journey,” he said.
“It means that high value products coming out of South Australia can be traced right along the supply chain, and you can have that seal of approval that this product is what it says it is.
“Counterfeiting of quality products is not just a problem in China, but a problem globally.”