“The wine industry should follow the development of blockchain technology closely”, says OIV

“Today we have the digital tools and data science that are driving innovative progress for our society in our life and economy”, said Pau Roca, managing director of the International Organisation of Vine and Wine (OIV) on 24 November, during a symposium on the digital transformation of the industry. “It is important to bear in mind that these new technologies offer us incredible opportunities in terms of analytical and predictive tools, and this will speed up procedures across-the-board”, stressed the Spanish diplomat.

“Even though we can see that the vine and wine sector is more conservative, it is clear that we live in a world that is increasingly driven by data. The world of wine and vineyards is no exception”, added Giorgio Delgrosso, head of digital transformation at OIV. Among the current trends, “one of the technologies that will probably have the greatest potential for the wine industry is blockchain”, claimed Delgrosso.

Currently used for crypto-currencies (primarily Bitcoin), the information storage technology could enable wines to be tracked by all the links in the supply chain, from the vineyard through to the marketplace. “There are many reasons why the wine industry should closely follow the development of blockchain technology [which] offers interesting elements of distributed trust (a single source of truth, immutability and the ability to set up smart contracts)”, said Delgrosso. He claims the scope of application would be crucial in “a market that has a fairly high rate of fraud and counterfeiting” considering the industry is “very fragmented with many SMEs that often have complex and outdated ledgers”.