EY inks deal to build blockchain-powered wine authenticator

Big Four professional services firm EY is leveraging blockchain to take a sip of the lucrative wine industry. In a recently announced partnership with Blockchain Wine Pte Ltd, the firm will use EY Ops Chain, which allows businesses to capitalize on the industrialization of blockchain technology, to “determine the quality, provenance, and authenticity of new and vintage wines,” according to an EY press release.

The Tattoo Wine Platform will place its focus on Asian markets – specifically those in China, South Korea, Thailand, and Singapore – where the popularity and consumption of European wines is rapidly increasing. Tattoo stands for Traceability, Authenticity, Transparency, Trade, Origin, and Opinion. The platform will host more than 5,000 wine labels from global producers.

The House of Roosevelt, a premier Asian wine cellar, will use the Tattoo Wine Platform to easily sell wine to hotels, restaurants, cafes, and individual consumers or collectors, as well as serve as a middleman for customer-to-customer wine sales, allowing for efficient and cost-effective “investment-grade” wine collecting.

“We are thrilled that Blockchain Wine Pte. Ltd. and The House of Roosevelt have chosen EY teams to build the solution for their global commerce network,” Paul Brody, EY’s global blockchain leader, said. “The future of doing business will be through tokens and smart contracts and this network is at the forefront of this transformation.”

Through the Tattoo platform, customers will be able to track wines via QR code, which are “tattooed” on bottles, accessing information such as vineyard names and locations – and even minutiae such as types of fertilizer used to grow the grapes and batch transportation methods. Purchases will be made directly through the platform using tokens, after which real-time tracking information will be provided to the recipient, from customs status to warehouse storage.

“By integrating blockchain to our platform, we will establish direct connections between wine producers, the distributors, and the companies involved in logistics,” Tim Tse, president of The House of Roosevelt and chairman of Blockchain Wine Pte. Ltd., said. “Because we are now bringing in more imported wines, and quality is extremely important to us and our customers, we wanted a way to equip our distribution network in Asia and worldwide and, ultimately, their consumers, with the information they need to help ensure the source, authenticity, and availability of the product they are buying.”

While EY Ops Chain has to date helped clients tokenize more than 11 million bottles of wine, the technology continues to push boundaries, with chickens, eggs, and fresh produce among additional tokenized products. 

Blockchain doesn’t stop with EY. The technology is quickly becoming a go-to for organizations worldwide, thanks to its security, ease of use, trackability, and speed. The World Wildlife Fund in January announced OpenSC, a blockchain-powered platform that allows consumers to scan a food product’s QR code and be automatically provided with details regarding its origin, when and how it was produced, and how it journeyed along the supply chain. The end goal of the OpenSC project is to decrease or eliminate illegal, unethical, or environmentally damaging practices in food production, and help businesses remove products made in such ways from their supply chains.

The automotive industry, too, stands to greatly benefit from blockchain, with research suggesting the technology could create a global market for “extras” of more than $110 billion in the next decade.