La Prima of WineNews – Laws and technologies in the defense of Made in Italy

What value does the uniqueness of a product have? Is it worth it to create an original item, with its own specific market, if this then results in confronting the risk of being "pseudo-copied"? Obviously the answer is yes, and this is why the fight against counterfeiting is taking more steps forward, not only in terms of the laws, but also in the technologies used to guarantee the originality of products. Prime Minister Mario Monti also stated the same: "counterfeiting of Made in Italy products costs 50 billion Euros a year". Therefore, for Italian Wine & Food companies it is ever more important to invest in false-proof systems. These companies must keep constantly updated, because research in this sector continues to strive for solutions that are more and more effective. In this sense, an example of Italian excellence can be found in Modulgraf, a company located in Castelfranco di Sotto (Pisa) that produces commercial prints, which in collaboration with Esa Automazioni has designed the "Sono" project. It is an "all-in-one" package designed specifically for wine cellars, which includes labels printed with QR-code numbers, an advanced software program for managing logistics and tracking, code reading instrumentation, possible updating of websites and the possibility to modify the bottling line for automated management of the system. In other words, the QR-code printed on the labels can be read by a simple smart phone and then send the bottle code to the customer service center in real time for immediate verification of whether the wine is original or false, accessing information about the supply chain and tracking the origin of the bottle through the presence of sensitive data that the manufacturer has inserted into the database. This technology is not only compatible with the Rfid radiofrequency system (a small electronic chip incorporated into the back of the bottle label, box or carton, which is associated to a unique identification number and linked to an electronic device in the labeling line), already adopted by numerous Bordeaux wine merchants or top wine cellars like the Tenuta dell´Ornellaia, but it can also work in combination. Because the fight against counterfeiting can never be too much.