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Every knight needs a crusade and a sword. For Belmont-based entrepreneur Eric Vogt, who was knighted as a Chevalier de l’Ordre du Mérite Agricole by the French Minister of Agriculture in 2006, that crusade is to protect the honor and integrity of fine wines.
His weapon of choice? Radio frequency identification technology.
Shortly after receiving his knighthood for his work with the Grand Conseil de Bordeaux, Vogt, a founding member of the Massachusetts Computer Software Council (now called the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council) and founder of online community management firm Communispace Corp. in Watertown, launched eProvenance LLC, a firm dedicated to using RFID technology to provide detailed information regarding fine wines and the environments in which they travel.
“You can get a bottle of wine and rap your knuckles on it and it’s a pretty solid product,” he said. “But inside is a living organism, and once it leaves the chateau, producers have no idea what happens to it once it enters the global supply chain.”
EProvenance hopes to change that by affixing a semi-active RFID tag to each case, allowing importers, distributors and retailers to scan each case and produce an “e-pedigree” of the case. The key data point in the pedigree is temperature, as shifts both up and down can have dramatic effects on the taste of the final product. The RFID tags applied prior to shipping can track the temperature of the case over a two-year period, providing retailers and buyers with assurance the bottle has not been compromised. But the system also protects authenticity, which is important to a smaller audience.
“People that are really concerned about the quality of product in the sales and distribution channel represent about 15 percent (of the worldwide wine market), while the people concerned about counterfeit product are closer to 2 percent,” he said.
The worldwide consumption of wine is expected to reach 26.2 billion liters by the year 2010, according to a recent report by Global Industry Analysts Inc.. Fifteen percent of that is 175 million liters, and that, said Vogt, is the company’s target market.
EProvenance’s technology, a combination of internally developed intellectual property and off-the-shelf equipment, is not perfected to that scale yet, but the company has tagged more than 2,100 cases already.
The 10-person company has been funded by $1.5 million in equity, contributed by the founders, advisers, and angels, according to Vogt, who is a member of Cambridge-based angel group Common Angels.
While RFID technology has long been associated with large-scale supply chain tracking environments such as those used by retailers like Wal-Mart, the technology has been gradually working itself into niche applications such as eProvenance over the past few years.
“These kinds of applications are providing proof points for larger deployments and are supporting the core value propositions of the technology,” said Michael Liard, a research director covering RFID at ABI Research.
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