Wireless Message in a Bottle
Courtesy of Dr. Vino
Riders of public transport in Chicago or Oslo know RFID technology.
Bump your wallet at the turnstile and off you go--no fumbling to
swipe cards. Same with skiers at some ski resorts. And drivers in
the Northeast know the technology as well through E-ZPass toll
collection.
The same technology is coming to wine. Through an RFID sensor
placed in the (synthetic) cork, importers, stores and consumers can
now give each bottle a unique ID. While barcodes SKUs work for all
the bottles of a certain wine as a group, this technology gives each
individual bottle a unique--and unchangeable--ID. And unlike bar
codes, boxes don't have to be opened and nor bottles taken off
shelves to see more info about the wine. You just need to wave an
RFID reader, which even comes in some Nokia phones, about 2 inches
from the bottle and voila, all the info gets displayed.
The implications for consumers could be big. At the cost of $0.50
each though to the winery, it's most likely impact will be on
higher-end wines. Given the problem of fraud at auction, this would
put an end to wondering if you bought the real deal or not. Optional
fields could trace the bottle's previous owners and even track the
hammer prices. Sadly though the technology is difficult to put into
real corks and the uptake of synthetic corks in cult wines remains
almost nonexistent. It is currently available in one wine, the
Contemporare from Arnaldo-Capari, an excellent Sangiovese (find
this wine).
But it could have important impact on everyday drinking wines
too. An optional setting could add a temperature sensor that tracks
max and min temperatures during shipping. If consumers could buy a
bottle with the knowledge that it hadn't been cooked in transit,
that's something to which we could all raise a glass--and our RFID
readers!
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