Wine Digital Identity · IDV
What a wine is, as told by those who make it.
Manifesto
Wine should be drunk and felt before it's explained.
But sometimes we want to know more. Where it comes from. What's behind a vintage. What its maker wanted to express.
And there isn't always a sommelier beside us to tell us.
We can search the internet. Photograph the label. Ask an AI. But amid the noise, among thousands of answers, opinions and descriptions, there's a risk: losing the wine's true identity.
Because the label isn't enough. Because the waiter changes. Because the distributor simplifies. Because information fragments. And part of the story is lost before it reaches the glass.
When that happens, the wine loses something essential: its context.
The land where it was born. The vintage that defines it. The way it was made. The winery's philosophy. The landscape around it. The intention of whoever created it.
SommelierLab was born to preserve that connection.
Not to replace the sommelier. Not to tell you what to feel. Not to reduce the wine to a spec sheet.
But so that, when you want to know more, the wine itself can tell you who it is.
From the bottle. From a wine list. From the website. From an AI.
The winery's voice, the origin, the vintage, the process, the sensory profile and the story, bound to the identity of every wine.
The wine's story can travel with it.
Beyond the restaurant. Beyond the shop. Beyond the bottle.
Because a wine isn't just what it contains.
It's also everything it recounts.
SommelierLab — The Wine Digital Identity.
Wine can travel. So can its identity.
The Wine Digital Identity was born so that a wine's authentic information doesn't depend on where it is, who serves it or who talks about it.
The definition
The Wine Digital Identity (IDV) is what a wine is, as told by those who make it. The identity belongs to the winery, but SommelierLab publishes it structured and optimized, for people and for machines —search engines, AIs and bots—, in the winery's own voice and at an address of its own.
The layers
The IDV isn't a spec sheet or a single piece of content. It's a digital identity that brings together what the wine is, its winery's voice, its relationship with each bottle, and the experiences built around it.
01
The wine, signed
The IDV captures what defines the wine: its name and type; its origin, whether or not it has an appellation: the area, the vineyard, the soil and each year's climate, what we call its terroir; its grape varieties and vintage; how it was made and aged; its tasting notes and sensory profile; its story and its curiosity; its legal information; its technical sheet, and the awards and certifications it has received. Both the story and every single data point are signed, so none of them can change unnoticed.
The information that makes up the wine's identity is signed by the winery with a key that belongs to it. Anyone — a person or a system — can check that signature and verify that the declaration comes from that winery and that the signed data hasn't been altered.
02
The winery's voice
The IDV doesn't just hold information. It can also speak.
It tells the wine's story in the language of whoever's asking, in the tone the winery chooses.
It can convey what rarely fits on a spec sheet: why a vintage got that name, what happened in the vineyard, a decision made during production, or a story the winery's sommelier tells as an anecdote.
A website shows what the winery publishes. The IDV lets the winery also tell what it knows, whenever someone asks.
03
An identity that can change without losing its origin
The IDV can evolve.
When a piece of data that's part of the signed identity changes, the previous version stops representing the current one until the winery signs the new one.
Other parts of the experience — a pairing suggestion, a translation, an audio recording, certain visuals — can be updated without touching the wine's signed identity.
The identity can evolve. Its origin stays verifiable.
04
The bottle, with a name of its own
When the winery chooses to, for a given batch, the identity can extend down to each bottle.
Each unit carries its own code and stops being an anonymous bottle within a run: “Bottle 37 of 500.”
Whoever scans it finds the wine's identity and, on top of that, their bottle: its number, its verification, and the memory of it in their cellar.
05
Knowing where each bottle ends up
When bottles are individually identified, the winery can learn, in aggregate, where they're being scanned. Not who's scanning them.
That's information that's hard to get today for a winery that exports: it can know which importer it sold to, but not necessarily where its bottles end up.
The IDV can turn that last stretch into a useful signal for the winery.
06
Checking a bottle
Individual identification also makes it possible to check the relationship between a bottle and the batch it belongs to.
An importer, a sommelier, a collector, or someone buying a bottle at auction can check from their phone whether that code matches a bottle registered by the winery, and see whether that same identity has been scanned in different places.
This doesn't certify the bottle's physical contents. A printed code can be copied. What it can detect is the consistency — or anomaly — of the usage pattern.
07
The relationship with whoever drinks it
The IDV doesn't end with information.
When someone interacts with it, the wine can become an experience: the story told by the winery, by voice, in the language of whoever's asking; a virtual sommelier that explains that wine; a cellar where the wine and its memory stay on their phone.
And the winery can receive, always in aggregate and respecting privacy, what interests people, what they ask, and how their wine is perceived.
08
One address, many doors
Every IDV has its own persistent address on the internet.
The bottle's codes — the legal one and the experience one — are doors for whoever's holding the bottle. But the identity doesn't depend on the code.
The same IDV can be opened from a website, a search engine or an AI assistant, without scanning anything.
We don't promise what an AI will say. We give it an official source so it doesn't have to guess.
The bottle is one door. The website is another. The AI can be another. The identity is the same.
What the IDV isn't
- It doesn't replace the legal label. Mandatory information is part of the wine's identity, but it has its own door: the bottle's legal code, which shows it on its own, clean and separate from the experience, as EU regulation requires. The IDV includes it and goes further.
- It isn't a review or a rating. The winery writes and signs it. The awards and scores the wine has received from guides, critics or competitions can be part of it, always stating who gave them and when: it is the winery that declares having received them. Consumer ratings are never part of the official identity.
- It isn't an NFT or a blockchain. The IDV doesn't need to turn the wine into a digital asset or depend on a blockchain. It's an identity verifiable through cryptographic signatures and open standards, so that anyone can check who signed a declaration without asking SommelierLab for permission.
- It isn't the EU's Digital Product Passport. The Digital Product Passport answers to a different regulatory framework and a different purpose: it comes from the EU's ecodesign regulation, which excludes food — and wine is food. The IDV is a different layer: what the wine is, told and signed by its winery, and the relationship it builds with whoever drinks it. If new digital obligations for wine appear in the future, a winery that already has an IDV will have its data structured, organised and signed on a foundation built to evolve.
- It doesn't guarantee what's inside. The IDV certifies who declares what. Nothing more. Nothing less.
Who checks and who issues
Checking: anyone. Issuing: for now, SommelierLab.
The IDV separates two functions that shouldn't be confused: issuing a declaration and checking its signature.
- Checking: anyone, no permission needed. Every wine has its own address on the internet. Each winery's public cryptographic key is published and the signature registry is open. Anyone can check who signed an IDV, which version of the data was signed, and whether that signature is still valid, without needing SommelierLab's authorization.
- Issuing: today, SommelierLab, on behalf of each winery. Each winery has its own signing key. SommelierLab holds it encrypted and only uses it to sign the identity the winery has approved. If a key is revoked, the signatures tied to it stop being considered valid. Issuing can be handled by SommelierLab today without that making SommelierLab the owner of the identity. The identity belongs to the winery. The signature proves the declaration comes from it.
- No disguises. If SommelierLab signs an IDV on behalf of a winery because it's helping create or manage it, the public page says so explicitly. It isn't presented as the winery's direct signature when SommelierLab carried out the operation. Trust also depends on saying who did what.
Origin
Definition published by SommelierLab (Catalonia) on September 16, 2026. The original Spanish text is the one that is signed, and a copy is archived on the Wayback Machine that same day. This English version is a faithful translation of it.
Original text signed by SommelierLab on 6 October 2026 · check the signature