In August 2014, a prominent Indonesian wine dealer based in California was sentenced to 10 years in prison and made to pay a fine of $20 million to the government and $28 million in restitution to his victims. His crime? Manufacturing counterfeit wine in the basement of his home and selling it to his customers as special vintages. The sums paid in fines show just how lucrative counterfeiting high-end wine can be.
The problem is not confined to the United States. China, which has been the leading export market for French Bordeaux since 2011 and a top-ten destination for Burgundy since 2018, has a thriving black market in empty bottles of high-end vintages. Waiters sell these to counterfeiters who sell them as new after refilling them, reinserting a cork and replacing the capsule (the protective sleeve around the neck of the bottle).
In vino veritas
Of course, the presence of counterfeits on the market is lethal to the reputation and pricing-power of fine wines. That is why Toppan teamed up with Belgian object-identity specialist Selinko to develop two sophisticated solutions in the form of CorkTag™ (2017) and Cachet-Tag™ (2018). CorkTag is a tag that runs from the top of the neck above the cork and down one side of the capsule. It contains an IC chip and antenna circuit that simultaneously authenticates the product and protects it from tampering. Piercing the capsule with a corkscrew or slicing it with a knife breaks the circuit and sends an alert to a companion smartphone app using near-field communication (NFC technology). Cachet-Tag, meanwhile, is an NFC tag integrated into the label and processed to be brittle so that the antenna breaks when the label is removed, making reading impossible and showing that tampering has taken place.
Prestigious Burgundy maker Emmanuel Rouget was the first winemaker to adopt CorkTag (for its Grand Crus and Premiers Crus), while Domaine Ponsot was the first to adopt Cachet-Tag (for its Grand Crus).
