Fake Wine, Real Problem (And What We're Doing About It)

dVIN Labs Spotlight 🔦

Let’s talk about something the wine world doesn’t like to talk about: fakes.

If you’ve seen Sour Grapes, you’ll know the name Rudy Kurniawan—a guy who duped collectors out of millions by passing off cheap wine as rare bottles. He got 10 years in prison, but that was just one guy. The reality? Counterfeit wine is a $70 billion problem, and it’s been eating away at trust in our industry for decades.

Collectors are asked to trust paper trails and handshakes. Merchants cross their fingers and hope their source is legit. Even seasoned sommeliers have been fooled. The truth is, without a standardized system for tracking provenance, the wine world has been operating on vibes.

So we built something different.

Here’s the short pour on how our Digital Cork™ tech (backed by blockchain) changes everything:

🍷 Authenticity, Guaranteed
Each bottle gets a Digital Cork™—a unique digital twin linked to the physical bottle. It’s more than a certificate: it’s a complete, immutable record of the wine’s identity, provenance, storage, custody, and ownership—all recorded and secured on-chain.

📦 Full Chain of Custody
From cellar to bonded storage to marketplace, we track every hand that touches the bottle. Smart contracts log each movement so there’s no "he said, she said" about where it’s been.

🚫 Bye, Rudy
Swapping labels? Refilling empties? Not anymore. You can't fake a Digital Cork without getting caught. And once a bottle is opened, it gets “digitally “uncorked” (burned), preventing reuse.

💸 Trust = Value
Verified bottles hold value better, cost less to insure, and trade faster. More trust means a healthier secondary market—for everyone from producers to collectors.

🧠 Built to Scale, Not Silo
The wine world is full of fragmented data and systems. Digital Corks™ work as a universal framework—open and tech-agnostic—so producers and third-party verifiers can plug in their preferred tags, markers, or tracking tools.

🔐 No One-Size-Fits-All Tech
Whether it's an NFC capsule, RFID chip, or something more futuristic like chemical markers, dVIN doesn’t lock producers into one method. We support them all—and the blockchain ties it all together as the single source of truth.

📊 Proof That Travels With the Bottle
Every scan verifies not just the tag, but the match between the physical bottle and its verified digital twin. If anything’s off, the blockchain throws a flag—no matter where in the world that bottle ends up.

This isn’t about disrupting for the sake of it. It’s about protecting the magic of wine, from grape to glass.

📖 Want the full story?

👉 Read the full article here: https://news.dvinlabs.com/the-wine-authentication-crisis-how-blockchain-solves-the-70-billion-counterfeit-problem-1c77c04c3622

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🎧 In Case You Missed the latest podcast episode

Find out how blockchain is cleaning up wine’s messiest issues — from fakes to fragmentation. It’s a smart, presentation-style conversation, so I recommend watching along if you’ve got a screen handy.

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That’s it for this week! Stay tuned for more.

Cheers!

Jana
dVIN Labs Co-founder