A new project will lay the groundwork for Hunter Valley companies to use blockchain technology to sell wine to China.
The Wine Provenance Project involves testing the technology on wine labels and consumer behaviour.
"This project is about making Australian wines more interesting, available and safe for Chinese consumers," University of Newcastle Professor Lisa Toohey said.
"It's basically blockchain technology on wine labels."
Blockchain technology is a type of database that includes linked blocks of timestamped and encrypted information.
It provides a verifiable and permanent digital record of transactions involved in product creation.
This would help guard authenticity and promote exclusivity for products like wine.
"It means a consumer in China can scan the bottle and know where that exact bottle came from," Professor Toohey said.
"They'll find all sorts of environmental and consumer information about the provenance of the wine, which is good for preventing counterfeiting.
"It's also a chance to give consumers rich information to engage with and immerse themselves in."
It would give consumers the chance to connect with a Hunter Valley vineyard, for example, "from a supermarket in China".
The Hunter has been affected by trade tensions between Australia and China.
"When you have trade tensions, you need to think more creatively about how to get your product out there and build that rapport," Professor Toohey said.
Industry Links
The project is being done through the university's new Doctoral Training Centre in Food and Agribusiness, which officially opens this month.
The centre's convenor, Dr Tamara Bucher, said it was "an industry-academia collaboration platform that the university developed".
"This is a training centre we developed for fostering industry engagement and collaboration," Dr Bucher said.
Professor Toohey said the centre was an example of the university "working more closely with industry".
"It's really led by what industry needs and is interested in," she said.
"We're hoping to do more collaborations like that."
Irma Dupuis, one of the centre's first PhD students, will study the impact of blockchain-enabled technologies at all stages of the wine supply chain.
Ms Dupuis said blockchain technology had "been in use for a few years in the food and wine industry and is becoming more sought after".
However, she said there had been "little research conducted on blockchain applications from a consumer perspective".
"This project will be the first to test the influence of blockchain-enabled technology on consumer perception of wine products in a store environment," she said.
"I will study the placement of the technology, the scannability and ease of interaction, the relevance of the information made available and its influence over purchasing decisions."
The team hopes to gain new data to help the wine industry use the technology in markets where consumer trust and label information are barriers to purchase.
Hunter Valley companies Tamburlaine Organic Wines and First Creek Wines are funding the research, along with a labelling company called Multi-Color Corporation Australia.
The companies can provide expertise in areas including wine labels, feasibility, branding and the retail landscape.
The project involves the use of "a unique code for each label".
"Each label is effectively different. Each one will precisely refer to that bottle, where it came from and how it's been treated," Professor Toohey said.
Dr Bucher said one of the challenges was to "get consumers using this technology".
"When we started talking about the project, people didn't know how to scan a barcode," she said.
COVID-19 has changed that.
"People actually know what a barcode is, so we can actually have a better starting point."
The project will examine incentives that can be offered to consumers with the barcodes.
It will determine how to get consumers using the barcodes and what consumers will want from them.
"This is a consumer behaviour project, with a lot of field research and some survey-based studies," Dr Bucher said.
'The Future of Trade'
The emergence of blockchain technology coincides with people increasingly wanting to know how products are sourced and manufactured.
The technology promises to foster environmental protection and strengthen the era of sustainability.
The technology, which is secure by design, has been touted as having the potential to lay the foundations for a new socio-economic system.
It aims to stop problems like counterfeiting, copyright and misinformation, while pinpointing the source of products like food and minerals, for example.
Contracts will be embedded in digital code that is stored in shared databases and protected from tampering.
Professor Toohey said the technology was "the future of trade".
"It could be used for everything," she said.
"You'd know the carbon miles of a product, its safety and which port it went through.
"You'd know who it was handled by. You could literally trace any information about where it's been."
With blockchain technology, everyone who has contributed to the product would have the shared information.
"If anyone changes any piece of that information, they will see it on the record."
Sour Grapes
Blockchain technology will help protect wine sellers and buyers from fraud.
The Netflix documentary Sour Grapes told the story of Rudy Kurniawan, a wealthy and charismatic Indonesian wine collector who spent millions of dollars on wine in the US, while selling a large number of bottles of fake wine.
Kurniawan paid huge sums at auction for rare bottles of wine in the early 2000s.
He made friends with big players in the rare wine sector, deceiving them with his apparent wealth.
But French wine producer Laurent Ponsot raised suspicions, which sparked an FBI investigation.
FBI agents searched Kurniawan's house and found cheap wines with notes indicating they would be sold as vintages of Bordeaux. They also found corks, stamps, labels and other tools involved in counterfeiting wine.
Kurniawan was sentenced to 10 years jail in 2013.
He was released last November.
