EY builds blockchain platform for wine provenance and tokenization

Singapore-based Blockchain Wine has selected “Big Four” professional services firm EY to build a blockchain solution for determining the quality, provenance, and authenticity of new and vintage wines.

According to the official release dated May 23, the TATTOO Wine Platform has been developed using the EY OpsChain solution, the EY’s enterprise-grade blockchain platform launched in 2017.

The name “TATTOO” is actually an abbreviation for Traceability, Authenticity, Transparency, Trade, Origin, and Opinion.

The platform has received support from the House of Roosevelt, a leading wine cellar in Asia, which will use it to sell wines directly from vineyards to hotels, restaurants, cafes (B2B) and customers (B2C), and facilitate wine sales from customer to customer (C2C) for investment-grade wine collecting purposes.

The comprehensive platform will allow various stakeholders – wine producers, distributors, logistics providers and insurance operators – to trace origin and quality of wines. It will also facilitate tokenization by allowing the use of tokens for buying and selling wine, supply chain monitoring, and arranging for and tracking insurance coverage of wine shipments, among other things.

“The blockchain that EY teams developed for the TATTOO Wine Platform uses the standard ERC (Ethereum Request-for-Comment)-721 tokens to provide a token model to collect supply chain data and provide a mechanism for further evolution, such as automating procurement, order inventory and other processes,” Paul Brody, EY Global Blockchain Leader, said.

“The asset traceability module of EY OpsChain has helped tokenize more than 11 million bottles of wine for multiple clients.”

The process involves “tattooing” each bottle of wine with a unique QR code. By scanning the QR code, participants can access information such as vineyards’ names and locations, details such as the types of fertilizers used to grow the crops, and how each batch is transported for processing and delivery.

The TATTOO Wine Platform will initially focus on markets in China, Japan, South Korea, Thailand, and Singapore. Going forward, it will contain over 5,000 labels, including wines from France, Italy, Spain, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, South America and California, the release said.

A number of other startups, including Everledger and Medici Ventures-backed VinX are also working to bring the benefits of blockchain technology and tokenization to wines.