Winery and Wine Validation

It is important to allow wineries to self-provision their information and issue their own wine-backed tokens with OpenVino. However, to avoid fraud and mistakes, we need a mechanism to validate three important data points:

  1. That the winery exists, and is operational (able to produce and sell wine legally).

  2. That the person registering the winery with OpenVino has permission to do so. (can authenticate as someone of authority at the winery).

  3. That the wine being tokenized exists, and the volume of wine available matches the amount to be tokenized. (Validate that the number of litres of available wine matches the token issuance).

These three data points can be validated manually by a human, but ideally, to make OpenVino more scalable, these validation steps should be automated as much as possible.

Luckily, wine is a highly regulated product, and every country (or wine region within a country) has some sort of regulatory body responsible for validating wineries and wine.

Winery and Wine Validation in Argentina

The following section describes how OpenVino will automatically validate the winery and wine in Argentina, through collaboration with the Argentine national wine board (INV - Insitituto Nacional Vitivinícola)

Winery Validation

Every winery in Argentina must be registered with the INV and assigned a winery number.

This number must appear next to the name of the winery, as it is registered with the INV on the back label of all wines produced. For example, our winery Costaflores (the company’s fantasy name) is actually Organic Costaflores S.A. (the legal name), and has an INV number of A87595. In fact, Costaflores relies upon a secondary winery for production and bottling (B73260), but that is not important for our task here. The Winery to be validated for tokenization is Organic Costaflores S.A., A87595.

Wine Validation

Every wine produced in Argentina must be chemically tested for a number of elements, including most importantly the alcohol content by volume. Wineries submit samples of their wines to the INV or other authorized laboratories for testing. Since wine changes over time, and different batches can be involved, wines that are to be exported must be tested annually. The test parameters involved depend on the destination market. Included in the test results are descriptors such as the grape varietal and vintage, and the INV also keeps track of the total available volume (litres) of wine.

Here is a label example showing the analysis number assigned by the INV: M1751813E.

Interaction OpenVino and INV

To automate the wine and winery validation from the OpenVino winery provisioning tool, we need to program the following steps:

  1. The winery that wishes to tokenize their wines provides the winery number (A87595 in this example) and the name of the winery as it should appear on OpenVino.exchange (Costaflores).

  2. The provisioning tool should take the winery number and connect to a webservice provided by INV (probably using http://id.argentina.gob.ar ) to authenticate the user with a password or “clave fiscal”.

  3. The provisioning tool registers that the winery is valid (registered and “enabled” with the INV).

  4. The winery provides the provisioning tool with the wine analysis ID (M1751813E).

  5. The provisioning tool connects to an INV webservice provided for OpenVino to receive the analysis results, including alcohol content and total volume. The webservice is authenticated uniquely to the OpenVino provisioning tool.

By authenticating in steps 1 and 2, the winery is tacitly authorizing OpenVino to retrieve the wine analysis results from the INV database.