What if it were possible to prove that every vineyard soil, anywhere in the world, had an individual and identifiable fingerprint? And what if you could prove that that fingerprint continues through into the grape and then into the wine? And doesn’t change throughout the lifetime of the wine? What then?
It's a mind-boggling idea, is it not? But if you're a forensic scientist, it's not as mind-boggling as all that. You can analyze cotton to see where it comes from, and to make sure that everybody in your supply chain is telling you the truth. If the unique characteristics of a place can be detected even after all the processes that cotton undergoes, why not wine?
That was the logic, more or less, that about six years ago – because somebody knew somebody else who knew somebody else in a forensics company – that led to a partnership between Pyramid Valley, a tiny wine producer in North Canterbury, New Zealand, and Oritain, a New Zealand forensics company specializing in traceability.
Look at Oritain's website and you get an idea of who needs this sort of thing: Manuka Health in NZ; Cotton USA; Meat & Livestock Australia; all organizations where origin matters. And all somewhat bigger than Pyramid Valley.
But wine fraud is big business. Nobody has yet tried to fake Pyramid Valley, as far as co-owner Steve Smith knows, but he regards his work with Oritain as a sort of insurance policy. Until now, producers have relied on modifications of the packaging – embedded microchips, that sort of thing, or NFTs – to prevent counterfeiting. This system can trace the wine – that actual wet stuff – back to the vineyard.
Not all the practicalities have been fully ironed out yet, and there are one or two obvious problems in how the system might be used. But Stew Whitehead, global head of food at Oritain, stresses that it is a work in progress. The point is that as a way of guaranteeing and proving authenticity, it works, they say. Smith says he got confirmation of everything only last June. His labels now bear a logo and a QR code that will verify the wine back to its origin.
So how does it work? First, there is a great deal of soil sampling. The samples are analyzed for trace elements and isotopes – they’re looking for 42 of the 118 elements that make up the periodic table, in parts per million and parts per billion. And elements, not compounds.
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