Champagne is now connected: Thanks to tracking technology, champagne houses now have tools to better guard against fraud while gaining a new channel to interact with their customers.
Using a combination of unique QR codes and radio-frequency identification (RFID) emitters integrated into the label or the bottleneck foil, each bottle of bubbly can now be tracked to help battle counterfeiting of the luxury product.
“In 2016, we didn’t print any connected labels. In 2019 we’ll be at one million! The market has doubled each year,” said Arnold Deregnaucourt, head of Billet, a company which has specialized in printing labels for champagne bottles for more than a century.
Photo: AFP
While a number of firms like Adents, Antares Vision and Tesa Scribos offer food and beverage makers a way to track their goods, Billet hopes that its long history working with the champagne industry will give it an advantage in adapting the technology to its practices.
Laurent Berns, founder of TraceAWine, a technology startup that has acquired Billet, said QR codes are sufficient for smaller champagne houses, but for those with production lines that handle more than 12,000 bottles per hour the RFID emitters are added to speed up the process as they allow for scanning bottles inside boxes.
With a QR code and RFID emitter on each bottle carrying a unique code, which is linked to a unique internet address, one can track the journey each bottle makes from the champagne house to your house. Or not.
“We can detect anomalies like, for example, a bottle which is scanned in Britain but then ends up in Russia,” said Berns. “Our system will alert the client.”
Champagne houses, like other makers of luxury products, don’t only worry about outright counterfeiting, but controlling their supply chains to ensure prices aren’t undercut in parallel or grey markets.
FOILING COUNTERFEITERS
This is something that the owner of the Pierre Peters champagne house, located in the heart of the prestigious Cote de Blancs region, knows about all too well.
“Our champagnes are sold to importers, restaurants, wine shops,” said Rodolphe Peters, who is also cellar master at the house founded in 1854. “We don’t sell to individuals any more except for a few long-time clients, but several were profiting by selling bottles for two or three times higher.”
The connected labels helped him track down those who were reselling their bottles in the US, putting pressure on the prices he charged there.
The SGV trade association of growers and winemakers in Champagne wants to go further.
After six years of research and development, it began offering in 2017 a capsule integrating a QR code that not only tracks the bottle, but acts as a guarantee of the authenticity of the champagne inside.
A capsule is what winemakers call the protective wrapping or coating at the top of the bottle, which was originally developed to protect corks from rodents and weevils.
While other wine and alcohol makers have used QR codes and RFID emitters, the SVG believes that champagne makers are the first to use them in the capsules.
‘A REAL REVOLUTION’
“What is new, and which isn’t easy to accomplish, is the integration of the technology in the capsules which are made of complex materials and are manufactured with heat,” said Catherine Chamourin, head of projects at SGV.
“We chose to put the codes on the capsules rather than the labels or the bottle as the capsules are destroyed when opening the bottle and can’t be reused,” she added.
This makes them much like the excise tax labels that some countries affix onto the top of alcohol bottles, which makes it impossible for them to be used again, and provides an indication that the product is genuine and hasn’t been tampered with.
French wine and champagne bottles sold domestically already carry an excise tax label on the capsule, which consumers appreciate as it contains information whether the winery uses its own grapes or buys them from others. Eric Lamaille, who heads up the capsule project at SGV, said winemakers are very enthusiastic about the capsules with integrated QR codes and several million have already been sold.
He called it “a real revolution”.
The revolution is the not just in the tracking, but in connecting producers and consumers.
While both appreciate that the information about the product’s journey ensures it is genuine, when the customer scans the QR code on their smartphone it is an opportunity for both to learn more about the other.
Reims-based champagne house Krug has been doing this with its ID bottles for the past six years. A code on the back label is the key to a treasure chest of information.
“The history of the house and the bottle, the composition of the champagne, the land parcels used, how long it spent in the cellar, serving suggestions and food pairing tips and even advice on what music to listen to,” said the house’s director, Olivier Krug.
“Digital even allows our connoisseurs to meet,” he added.
With luxury brands eager to bolster the experience around their products, learning who their customers are and drawing them into their websites is an important development that will have marketing managers lifting their glasses in celebration.
Last week Joseph Nye, the well-known China scholar, wrote on the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s website about how war over Taiwan might be averted. He noted that years ago he was on a team that met with then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), “whose previous ‘unofficial’ visit to the US had caused a crisis in which China fired missiles into the sea and the US deployed carriers off the coast of Taiwan.” Yes, that’s right, mighty Chen caused that crisis all by himself. Neither the US nor the People’s Republic of China (PRC) exercised any agency. Nye then nostalgically invoked the comical specter
Relations between Taiwan and the Czech Republic have flourished in recent years. However, not everyone is pleased about the growing friendship between the two countries. Last month, an incident involving a Chinese diplomat tailing the car of vice president-elect Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) in Prague, drew public attention to the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) operations to undermine Taiwan overseas. The trip was not Hsiao’s first visit to the Central European country. It was meant to be low-key, a chance to meet with local academics and politicians, until her police escort noticed a car was tailing her through the Czech capital. The
April 15 to April 21 Yang Kui (楊逵) was horrified as he drove past trucks, oxcarts and trolleys loaded with coffins on his way to Tuntzechiao (屯子腳), which he heard had been completely destroyed. The friend he came to check on was safe, but most residents were suffering in the town hit the hardest by the 7.1-magnitude Hsinchu-Taichung Earthquake on April 21, 1935. It remains the deadliest in Taiwan’s recorded history, claiming around 3,300 lives and injuring nearly 12,000. The disaster completely flattened roughly 18,000 houses and damaged countless more. The social activist and
Over the course of former President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) 11-day trip to China that included a meeting with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping (習近平) a surprising number of people commented that the former president was now “irrelevant.” Upon reflection, it became apparent that these comments were coming from pro-Taiwan, pan-green supporters and they were expressing what they hoped was the case, rather than the reality. Ma’s ideology is so pro-China (read: deep blue) and controversial that many in his own Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) hope he retires quickly, or at least refrains from speaking on some subjects. Regardless