Help Protect California Wine’s Integrity: Participate in the Wine Authenticity Project

The Wine Authenticity Project — which focuses on ensuring a bottle of wine’s legitimacy, helps combat fraud and counterfeits and most importantly, protects a wine’s integrity — is continuing and we’re asking for your ongoing assistance.
 
With the help of submitted wine samples, a U.S. wine variety database is being created and will serve as a set of technical criteria for the global regulatory community to determine authenticity. A comprehensive database also will help American wine to be more easily identifiable when being reviewed to enter markets overseas. Wine from specific producers or brands are not identifiable because participating wineries are anonymized through a double-blind submission process for samples.
 
Continuing to obtain samples is key to achieving a strong database. There are private and regulatory laboratories throughout the world using a technique known as nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) that can potentially verify a wine’s origin and variety. The wine sample’s spectra or digital signature — which contains hundreds of signals that provide information about its composition — will be analyzed with statistics and chemometrics. This important set of data is providing a reference for wine varieties and wine production regions.
 
To date, we have nearly 2,000 diverse samples from California, New York and Oregon, and are expecting to receive samples from Washington. Contributors represent 56 different locations. Our goal is to have a minimum of 100 samples for each variety. We welcome all samples but especially have a current need for Malbec, Petite Sirah, Pinot Gris, Riesling and Sauvignon Blanc. Wine samples must be at least 95% of one grape variety.
 
Additional information on this effort can be found on the Wine Authenticity Project web page. This multi-year project is supported by a U.S. Department of Agriculture grant.