Identiv Wine Authentication Innovation Award

A New Standard for Trust: How IoT Is Transforming Wine Authentication

October 20, 2025

By Klaus Simonmeyer, Vice President, Identiv

Fine wine carries years of culture and craft in a single bottle. For collectors, connoisseurs, and producers, wine carries meaning that extends well beyond taste. But in recent decades, wine has also become one of the most counterfeited luxury goods in the world – a problem now estimated to cost the industry billions of dollars annually.

The challenge goes beyond forgery of labels or bottles. Fraudsters are sophisticated, able to refill genuine bottles with cheaper wines or create convincing replicas that fool even seasoned experts. For producers, auction houses, and buyers alike, the risks to reputation and trust are enormous.

It’s why Identiv and our partners Genuine-Analytics, ZATAP, and NXP® Semiconductors joined forces to develop a breakthrough authentication solution. And it’s why we’re proud that this innovation has been recognized with a World Beverage Innovation Award at drinktec 2025.

Why Wine Needs More Than Tradition

For centuries, wine authentication has relied on human expertise alone: sommeliers, auction house inspectors, and collectors applying knowledge and trained instincts to spot fakes. That expertise is still indispensable. But as counterfeiting has grown into a global business, even the sharpest eye benefits from a technology partner – one that can provide fast, secure, and tamper-proof data to back up traditional methods.

Together with Genuine-Analytics, ZATAP, and NXP, we’ve built a system that transforms wine authentication from art into science. The solution creates an immutable digital twin of a wine bottle, linking its physical identity and its contents to blockchain-verified data.

  • Identiv’s role: We design and supply the secure NFC inlays – powered by NXP’s NTAG® 424 DNA TagTamper chips – that physically anchor each bottle to its digital identity and detect any tampering attempts.
  • Genuine-Analytics’ role: Using advanced scientific analysis, they sample wine directly through a microscopic, laser-drilled hole and verify it against their proprietary winePROOF database of 1,400 digital profiles of leading high-end wines
  • ZATAP’s role: Their platform provides the mobile interface and blockchain integration, ensuring that authentication data is accessible, transparent, and secure in real time.

The result is an end-to-end system that confirms both the authenticity of the bottle and the integrity of the wine inside. 

Proof in the Marketplace

The solution has already been tested in high-stakes environments. At a Swiss wine auction in 2024, where bottles sold for more than 20,000 Swiss Francs each, the platform was deployed to verify authenticity. It successfully identified a counterfeit bottle before it could enter circulation – and gave buyers and sellers confidence that every authenticated wine was the real thing.

Moments like this matter. They give producers confidence their brands are protected, assure auction houses their reputations are intact, and provide collectors with certainty that the vintages they invest in are authentic.

Raising the Bar for Authenticity

At Identiv, we see the World Beverage Innovation Award recognition as validation of a broader mission: using specialized IoT to protect products, strengthen supply chains, and build transparency wherever authenticity matters.

While wine may be one of the most notorious cases of counterfeiting, the same principles apply to spirits, luxury goods, and even pharmaceuticals. By linking physical products to verified digital identities, we create new opportunities for industries to digitize trust at scale.

Winning the award is an important milestone – but it’s also just the beginning. Counterfeiting will continue to evolve, and so will the technologies needed to combat it. This collaboration shows what’s possible when IoT and analytics converge, setting a new standard for authenticity in wine and beyond.