Temperature Sensitive Labels, Will You See Them?
Technologies are improving for detecting wine temperature during shipping...but are they economically feasible to use on an industry-wide scale?
There has been a recent spate of articles circulating the web about temperature sensitive labels, some of which have styled themselves as groundbreaking stories. These labels however, have been around for over a decade. Well, let me correct myself, not so much "these labels" as there are newer technologies out
there, but a label that shows if temperature has been exceeded according to wine standards, has been around for quite some time. So the question is: why are we just now beginning to hear about them in the marketplace?
There has been reluctance on the part of wineries to adopt the technology, basically. Now the wineries are not averse to the cost (which is negligible) nor the idea of ensuring that you, the end user/consumer of their laboriously produced work of art, receive the wine in its best possible state.
So can anyone think of any level(s) of the wine sales chain that might have a bit of an aversion to such technology? And can influence whether or not a winery would chose to be so bold as to ensure that their product was 100% free of temperature spikes?
You guessed it, distributors and retailers, with a footnote to delivery/transportation services.
The current higher-tech labels are actually devices which can record temperature throughout the travel of a bottle of wine, and the temperature data can then be downloaded at the winery to see what levels were maintained or attained.
But long before this type of offering, there was a simple fiber label that could be used as the background of the actual printed bottle artwork, and the material would change color if the wine exceeded a certain temperature. The problem? It would stay that color. No one wanted that kind of blatant bad advertising for their wine, their distribution, or their retailer. With recent studies in England about how many retailers keep their wines at less than ideal temperatures, many consumers are far more sensitive to how their wines are stored, as well as how they fared on a container across either ocean. Imagine if you knew that Wine X had such labels, and you saw a whole rack of them that were the "wrong" color, would you buy them? And what if the retailer opened his case of delivered Wine X, fresh from the distributor, only to find they were all the "wrong" color? Back up to the distributor who discovers the same upon receipt from the cross country delivery service? You begin to see the gridlock of blame up the delivery route, and a rather lively game of hot potato ensues, with the winery ultimately suffering from the "bad exposure" regardless of if it was their fault or not.
But these newer "labels" do not give you that kind of in-your-face and permanent-as-a-scar type of information, these labels merely track the data, never letting you, the buyer, know if your wine has been stored properly. They are designed to be affixed to a case of wine, not so much every bottle. They can record data for up to eight weeks and are programmed by the manufacturer to record breaches in high and low temperature tolerances per client specifications. Now they do have a flashing LED that will remain green if all is well, and will flash yellow if not, but do you really think your retailer is going to keep those in the cardboard case for you to see? Doubtful. Or is the distributor going to devote the manpower resources to 1) take the time to use a proprietary electronic reader to download the data from the label, compile it into an Excel document, and email back to the winery, or 2) rip off the label with care, drop it in an envelope, and send it back to the winery? Are they going to do that, in August? Hmmm... Granted it seems that some wineries (Biale and Schug) have begun playing with this technology, but I wonder where the liability will fall...
So a lot like some of our newer electronic tongues and noses that are employed to counter fraud, this device, though promising, is flawed in my cynical mind as it relies upon one of the least trustworthy components in any transaction: the human one.
I think it would be awesome, if not financial suicide, for a winery to employ the older style label, the one that permanently changes color once an unacceptable level has been reached, and inform their respective business partners of its use, thereby putting the onus on them to insure that while the wine is in their care, the labels stays original, and if it ever changes, that they should not seek out the winery for any "bad wine" remunerations nor should they sell the wine if it hit bad temperatures along their portion of the multi-tier sales system. But then I don't own a winery, yet.