Discovering the origin of one’s wine while consuming it from the comfort of your own home? Our use case Enhanced Quality Certification System will make this possible. But let’s not put the cart before the horse as there is much more to it than that. Quality certification systems are needed to enhance trust and provide a standardized approach, protecting the quality of EU products while being less vulnerable to fraud. This is achieved by the use of IoT technologies such as sensors, RFID tags and intelligent chain analyses. Those traceability tools, online registration and sensor data provide proof of origin and production method to certification bodies.
To adopt to the varying sizes of wineries, regional differences and production methods of our testing sites remains a challenge for this use case. To address those challenges, specific sensors from WINEGRID, using LoRa or Wi-Fi connection, have been deployed on each testing site across Italy. Moreover, we rely on SIAN (Italian Agricultural Information System), the main administrative tool of institutional development and capacity building in the Italian agricultural and rural development policies. We base our feedback to winemakers on those tools to help them achieve the sustainable agricultural development targets. Moreover, we use the tools to provide technical advice to support compliance with production and sustainability targets while ensuring their production philosophies and business models are constantly evaluated.
In this vein, our Enhanced Quality Certification System use case developed a standardised software to facilitate transparency in agriculture and boost efficiency by connecting each factor along the supply chain. By using digital tools for certification, we reduce the use of paper and make the entire certification process faster and more efficient because human errors are reduced significantly. This ultimately also increases the quality of our wines which will most likely appeal the most to wine enthusiasts. Another advantage this use case offers to consumers is the aforementioned virtual tour of the winery. We embrace augmented reality solutions from UQIDO to successfully bridge the gap between winemakers and consumer, while making the latter more aware of the different production processes.
Achieving those ambitious goals, however, requires overcoming further challenges. One major challenge for this use case is that the testing of our setup on each specific winery can only be done once a year. Moreover, the difference in each field setup makes the standardisation of gathered data troublesome. When it comes to the availability of external data from SIAN we are faced with a highly regulated sector, which necessitates close collaboration with policy-makers. In contrast to that, the standardisation of our software came as less of a challenge. Apart from insufficient broadband access in rural areas, hampering the installation, we were also confronted with the realisation that sensors and farmers need to synergise and co-evolve in order to get the best results for everyone involved.
