NAPA, Calif. — At Colgin Cellars, a kiss is not just a kiss.
For years, vintner Ann Colgin has sealed bottles of her sought-after wine headed for auction with a bright-red lipsticked kiss on the label, a charming, and undeniably personal, certificate of authenticity.
But with concerns growing about counterfeiters, she and other Napa Valley vintners are turning to high-tech fraud prevention so customers can feel confident they’re taking home genuine wine.
Colgin, who hasn’t yet had someone attempt to fake her wine and hopes to keep it that way, recently signed a deal with Eastman Kodak Co. on a system that employs invisible markers added to inks and other packaging components.
“Our wine is essentially a luxury good and I do believe that these rare and collectible luxury goods are targets,” said Colgin, whose ultra-premium wines can fetch hundreds of dollars a bottle at auction.
With the new system, buyers at auctions and other secondary markets can ask the winery to scan their labels if they have any doubts, although the measures are primarily intended to put off counterfeiters.
It’s hard to gauge how wide a problem counterfeits are in the U.S. wine industry, which according to a recent industry commissioned study pumps $162 billion a year into the economy, including grapegrowing, tourism and other related impacts.
Wine Spectator magazine has reported that some experts believe as much as 5 percent of wines sold in secondary markets such as auctions may be counterfeit, although others consider that figure too high.
Unlike CD and DVD counterfeiting, wine piracy hasn’t become a noticeable drain on the industry yet, so U.S. vintners are acting defensively.
There have been cases of counterfeit wines reported in Europe and China, and this spring there were reports that federal authorities in New York were investigating whether counterfeits were passed off as rare vintages, including some said to be part of Thomas Jefferson’s collection. According to a lawsuit believed to have partly prompted the investigation, five bottles of wine — including four said to be owned by Jefferson — sold for $500,000.
Regardless of how many phony pinots are out there, it seems clear that interest in preventing fraud has spiked as new technology has become available, said Daniel Welty, marketing manager for Petaluma based John Henry Packaging, which prints labels for wineries as well as other clients.
Anti-fraud measures being explored include tamper-proof seals, radio-frequency identification chips sunk into corks and using inks that only show up under special lights.
The Kodak technology used by Colgin and three other highend Napa wineries involves putting proprietary markers, which Kodak will describe only as a “forensically undetectable material” into things such as printing inks, varnishes, paper, etc., that can only be detected by a Kodak handheld reader, also proprietary, which incorporates laser technology.
The idea is to come up with something easy to use and hard to detect, meaning it’s that much harder for counterfeiters to figure out and copy, said Steve Powell, general manager and director for Security Solutions, Kodak’s Graphic Communications Group.
The John Henry packaging company is using technology developed by Hewlett-Packard Co. to develop multicolored codes or graphics into labels. Colors and character combinations can be constantly changed to thwart copycats, Welty said.
The codes can be microprinted, so they’re visible only with magnification, or in type that can be easily read.
“We want to be sure that we can give our customers the assurance of the integrity of our brand and label after we spent so much time and effort to try to accomplish what we’ve done over the years,” said Garen Staglin of Staglin Family Vinyard.
In San Francisco, Jerome Zech, CEO of WineBid.com, which had $22.5 million in sales last year, doesn’t think wine fraud is prevalent.
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