Schuler St. Jakobs Kellerei is the oldest and acclaimed wine-growing and trading company in Switzerland. It was founded by Johann Jakob Castell in 1694 and it is owned today by Jakob Schuler, who will celebrate his 75th birthday and 50th professional anniversary in 2023. The company’s managing director is the world-famous wine expert Nikolas von Haugwitz.
Schuler owns three wineries – in Switzerland, Tuscany and Armenia, as well as 16 wine shops, a wine bar, its own laboratory (performing 6,000 analyses per year) and its own cooperage.
Schuler and Authena introduced an absolute novelty: they created the first Swiss phygital wine, a limited collection of 1000 bottles tamper-proof uniquely and safely paired to a digital twin in the Metaverse. Thanks to Authena the Schuler wine community enters the metaverse and can now safely trade its authentic phygital in the secondary market. This is made possible with Authena M3TA™ and its proprietary technology consisting of NFC seals, blockchain native integrations and smart contracts.
Schuler is bringing an artificially generated image of a gorilla to the wine bottle for the first time as a label, turning it into a work of art. The wine label with the colorful “Bored Gorilla” adorns a special series limited to 1,000 magnum bottles, which Schuler has specially developed using Merlot and Tempranillo grapes from the Spanish winery Propriedad de Arinzano, Vinos de Pago. This blend results in a wine with fruity character and a long aging potential. The wine impresses with its rich and elegant taste, which shifts into a perfect balance of acidity, volume & mature tannins.
Thanks to Authena technology, each magnum bottle is unique, tamper-proof and digitally tokenized by a thousandth of the image on the label, which customers receive in the form of an NFT.
“An AI-generated “Bored Gorilla” is making its global debut on a 1000 limited edition wine collection” says Nikolas von Haugwitz, CEO of Schuler St. Jakobs Winery. “Each of Schuler’s limited-edition magnum bottles are made tamper-proof and authentically certified in the real world and in the metaverse thanks to Authena M3TA™”
In this way, both companies set a new course in the wine trade, not only in their country, but also abroad.
Activating both a digital first and a physical first purchasing experience through the smart contracts in the user-friendly Authena M3TA™ DApp (decentralized app), to manage also the distribution of exclusive content to the phygital owners.
Authena’s anti counterfeiting, traceability and customer engagement technology was developed specifically in the first place for wine products in the first place Overtime Authena patented solutions have been successfully adopted in pharmaceutical, luxury, food & beverage, sport and industrial sectors and are at the forefront of the fight against fakes, parallel imports and product diversion in more than 70 countries.
Wine counterfeiting is an extremely lucrative business by far and accounts for the largest share of food counterfeiting. Only in the European Union, wine fraud costs the regular wine sector an estimated €1.3 billion a year. Authena and the European Anti-Fraud Office are fighting back.