A world’s first for the wine market – A limited phygital wine collection with an AI-generated “Bored Gorilla” label

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.

About the Bored Gorilla wine project

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.

Challenges:

• Turning wine into a unique phygital collector’s item,
• Providing easy and instant access to information about the “Bored Gorilla” wine information, authenticity and bottle integrity
• Securing each part of the “Bored Gorilla” image in the Metaverse and pairing each of them to the 1000 limited edition wine bottles.
• Onboarding in the metaverse Schuler wine customers with an easy user experience
• Winning the interest in schuler wine of the new generations

Solutions:

• Assigning a unique identifier to both the physical bottles and the tokenized images
• Design and produce customized NFC seals to protect each single bottle against counterfeiting and tampering (including fraudulent refilling),
• Creating Schuler Bored Gorilla NFT collection on the major NFT marketplaces

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.

Results:

• 1000 bottles of wine equipped with an NFC seal – the NFC physical-digital seal was applied under the wine capsule and any attempt to peel it off will damage it irreversibly, thus making it clear that the product has been tampered with.
• Each bottle uniquely paired to an NFT, representing 1/1000 of the original AI-generated “Bored Gorilla” image,
• Every end-user owning a smartphone can interact physically with the product by tapping via NFC, the physical-digital seal protecting it. The information that can be retrieved is related to the bottle authenticity, state of integrity and details about the wine characteristics. On the other hand, only the wine owners will be able to access, manage and resell the unique NFT paired to each bottle, which consists of one thousandth of the original “Bored Gorilla” image.
• Customers become the owners of a rare phygital collector’s item, a limited edition wine bottle, paired to a digital artwork, that they can trade freely together with its authenticity certificate immutably stored on blockchain.
• Bored gorilla NFTs, as authenticity and ownership certificates safely accessed and managed through the Authena DApp
• Exclusive content distributed by Schuler to the “Bored Gorilla” phygital collection owners
• The NFT ownership grants access to an exclusive circle of Schuler’s friends which will be rewarded with exclusive content, special offers and tasting workshops, creating an engaged and exclusive consumer community.

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.

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