New Technology for Old Wines Against Counterfeit Bottles

"In China and Vietnam, you find more counterfeit than authentic bottles,'' Serge Tchekhov said in a phone interview with Elin McCoy of Bloomberg.

In order to fight counterfeit wines winemakers are considering to deploy new technologies such as RFID, now that holograms obviously are replicated too easily by counterfeiters, see Genuine Fake Holograms From China here.

Tchekhov now works with Swiss wine-security company Algoril. Before he was working as wine expert for a commission to fight counterfeiting, set up by France's offical printing company Imprimerie Nationale, under the Finance Ministry in 2004. Its study showed counterfeits accounted for about 9 percent of the global economy.

Read McCoy's article about new ways to guarantee the authenticity of wines here.

Unmentioned in the article but even more important, however of a much smaller scale, is the problem of authentic bottles with fake wine. Technology that shows whether a bottle has been opened or not should guarantee this is not the case. Otherwise only a connaisseur might taste the difference.