Wine & Spirits - February 2021 - 8

News
in Brief
● Terre Alfieri has become
Piedmont's newest DOCG. It allows
for a red wine based on nebbiolo
and white wine from arneis (85
percent minimum for both). Terre
Alfieri's production area includes 11
municipalities, seven of them in the
province of Asti.
● Following allegations in the New
York Times of a history of issues
with gender equality at the Court
of Master Sommeliers and the
long-term manifestations in sexual
harassment, the body has elected 11
EMILY
WINES, MS

KEN EVENSTAD OF
DOMAINE SERENE

new board members. Christopher
Bates, Robert Bigelow, Brahm
Callahan, Keith Goldston, Michael
Meagher, Kathryn Morgan,
Joshua Nadel, Sabato Sagaria, Mia
Van de Water, Emily Wines and
David Yoshida, all MSes, will serve
terms of varying length to adjust
the usual staggered-terms model to
this one-time overhaul. The board
has unanimously elected Emily
Wines, MS as its chair, and the
group's first task will be delineating
criteria for selecting four additional
board members from outside the
organization to add diversity of
experience and perspective.

● ProWein, the international
wine trade fair held annually in
Düsseldorf, Germany has been
canceled for 2021 due to COVID19 concerns. It is scheduled to
resume March 27-29, 2022.
Verona's Vinitaly has moved the
dates of its 2021 exhibition from
April to June 20-23. Similarly,
VinExpo Paris has been postponed
from February 2021 to June 14-16,

● While the tariffs the US
imposed in October 2019 on wines
and spirits of several European
countries due to a trade dispute
involving government subsidies of
AirBus have remained unchanged
through 2020, a new tariff war
has started across the Pacific, as
China, alleging that Australian
producers dumped wine on the
Chinese market to the detriment
of local producers, set tariffs of up
to 212 percent on Australian wines
entering the country, effectively
undermining a market that
accounted for nearly 40 percent
of Australia's wine exports. As a
result, Australian producers are
reportedly diverting shipments to
other potential markets, including
the US, which might see lower
prices for these same wines.
● The Oregon wine industry lost
one of its leading members on

● Lucas Pichler and his father
Franz Xavier Pichler, of F.X.
Pichler in Austria's Wachau, have
withdrawn from Vinea Wachau
Nobilis Districtus-the association
the senior Pichler helped found in
1983. The organization established
quality designations of Wachau
wines on the basis of sugar ripeness
levels, lowest to highest: Steinfeder,
Federspiel and Smaragd, offering
consumers guidance in terms of
wine style. With climate change,
the Pichlers say that achieving
higher levels of sugar ripeness is a
regular occurrence, making Vinea
Wachau's standards obsolete. In its
place, the Pichlers will label their
wines according to the Districtus
Austriae Controllatus (DAC)
system, equivalent to France's
Appellation d'Origine Contrôlée
(AOC), starting with the 2020
vintage.

Blockchain Security

e

Provenance, a company that tracks wine shipment
conditions, has launched VinAssure, a blockchain-based
tracking service. Blockchain creates an unalterable record
associated with a product. By creating a shared public record
of the transactions and conditions associated with a particular
bottle, VinAssure can guarantee-for both consumers and trade-
information like shipping temperature, provenance or farming
practices and certifications.
Experiments with blockchain to trace the origins of food in
other areas of agriculture are well underway. In the wine industry,
however, it could have significant implications for the secondary
market decades in the future, as it will be impossible for fraudsters
to counterfeit backdated data, offering a verified provenance for
whenever (or wherever) entries are created in the ledger.
According to a spokesperson, VinAssure is " the first [company]
in the wine trade to design and offer a blockchain for the wine
industry, " rather than a blockchain company adding the capacity to
8

2021. Other fairs in Bordeaux,
New York and Hong Kong have
been postponed until 2022.

October 21, 2020 with the passing
of Ken Evenstad who, with his
wife Grace, founded Domaine
Serene in 1989. After success in
the pharmaceutical industry, the
Evenstads turned their amateur
interest in wine into a professional
one, purchasing property in the
Dundee Hills that they grew to 1000
acres, 300 of which are planted
to vines. Reversing the trend of
Burgundy winemakers investing
in Oregon, in 2015 the Evenstad
family acquired a Burgundy estate
of their own, Château de la Crée in
Santenay.

WINE & SPIRITS

FEBRUARY 2021

trace wine. The public-record blockchain will only grow as long as
it's handled by VinAssure users, but it will be proof that a bottle's
provenance. Because it is built on IBM's Blockchain Transparent
Supply platform, it is " interoperable with other blockchain solutions
built on top of the same platform, including IBM Food Trust. "
Importer André Tamers' De Maison Selections, which has used
eProvenance to track the temperatures of their shipments since
2015, will be the first company to use VinAssure. While the potential
uses of this technology are varied, for Tamers, it's first and foremost
about guaranteeing the integrity of the cold-chain, which he calls " a
passion project of the company for the last twenty years. " De Maison
will use VinAssure in its capacity as a national importer as well as in
its state-level distribution in New York and New Jersey. With more
data input into the chain, the guarantee grows ever stronger.
The Ste. Michelle Wine Estates Export Division and Maison
Sichel, a négociant in Bordeaux, will soon join De Maison as
VinAssure members. -Corey Warren
Wine & Spirits - February 2021

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