CSI Wine: Otago tech company Oritain has partnered with winery Pyramid Valley to launch the world’s first guaranteed verification-of-origin mark for wine. Video / Supplied
Dunedin tech firm Oritain has launched a new proof-of-origin mark for wine, based on its "forensic" testing of trace elements.
Everything that is grown, reared or made absorbs a unique ratio of isotopes and trace elements from unique local soil. This is what Oritain measures.
The launch - which happenedon Friday night in London, where Oritain opened an office last year - is in partnership with Kiwi vintner Pyramid Valley, the first winemaker to adopt the new mark.
US private equity billionaire and Pyramid Valley co-owner Brian Sheth with co-founder Steve Smith. The vineyard's wines will have a Oritain Verification of Origin and Provenance mark displayed on the bottle’s back label, with a QR code providing a direct digital link to the guarantee. Photo / Supplied
Oritain has ambitions for broad uptake among both new-world and old-world winemakers. The latter, especially, are looking for ways to combat so-called "wine fraud".
It's something of a stretch goal for a company spun out of research at Otago University, and just a few years old.
Yet Oritain is not without a track record. It already numbers a2 Milk, Silver Fern Farms and Lacoste as clients for its proof-of-origin verification.
And it's not without means.
New York-based private equity outfit Long Ridge Capital bought a chunk of Oritain in October last year as the Kiwi firm mounted a successful Series B roound.
"Oritain raised $32 million," chief executive Grant Cochrane says.
"But as the offer was oversubscribed, we also used the opportunity to create a secondary market that allowed some of the earlier investors to exit. In total, $58m was raised."
The CEO anticipates another raise in one to three years before Oritain goes back to the well to raise more capital for global expansion.
It's already won some rave press. Last year, The Guardian noted that there is a $49 billion market in counterfeit food, grown and reared products, from so-called free-range "New Zealand" lamb chops that actually come from foodlot animals in China, to extra-virgin olive oil cut with inferior product, to Egyptian cotton that's never been close to the Nile.
The paper called it a "supply chain crisis" in counterfeits.
It cited an audit by giant retailer Target, which found roughly 750,000 "Egyptian cotton" sheets and pillowcases, supplied by Indian conglomerate Welspun, were made with an inferior kind of cotton that didn't come from Egypt. Target refunded its customers, and dumped Welspun as a supplier. The publicly listed Indian firm took a $700m hit to its value.
"Our client retention rate is over 90 per cent, showing we can protect and enhance our clients' reputation" - Oritain CEO Grant Cochrane. Photo / Supplied
Welspun brought Oritain on board to restore its reputation and the integrity of its supply lines for raw cotton.
"Oritain is a kind of forensic detective agency – a supply-chain CSI," the Guardian said.
"The science actually stems from the criminal field," Oritain global head of food sales Stew Whitehead tells the Herald.
A scientist at an Oritain lab. The firm was co-founded by Professor Russell Frew - a geochemist who realised his research at Otago University could be applied to the problem of fraud in global supply chains. Photo / Supplied
Oritain was co-founded by Professor Russell Frew, a geochemist with Otago University who hit headlines in 2016 when his "Isotrace" unit supplied key forensic evidence that help secure the conviction of Auckland businessman Jeremy Hamish Kerr.
Kerr sent letters containing baby powder cut with 1080 to Federated Farmers and Fonterra in a blackmail threat. Frew's testing was able to trace the source of the 1080.
"The science isn't new and isn't novel," Whitehead says.
"What is novel and what is our competitive advantage is we're one of the only companies in the world providing food verification and traceability on a commercial scale, to a level which can be accepted in a court of law."
Pyramid Valley winemaker Huw Kinch. Oritain's technology means the vineyard can verify the origin of its newly-released 2020 Botanicals Collection down to individual blocks. Photo / Supplied
A key differentiator is the databases of samples that Oritain builds for each industry, Whitehead says, and understanding how many samples are needed for a robust database.
In beef and lamb, Oritain can trace meat to a specific farm. For Pyramid Valley, it will be able to trace wine to individual blocks on the vineyard.
With its well-funded push into viticulture, Oritain will look to build a database of thousands of samples from new and old-world vineyards.
High tech, low parochialism
Old-world makers like France do, of course, like to police their own vintages.
Will vintners in the home of Appellation d'Origine Contrôlée let a new-world upstart monitor their output?
Pyramid Valley’s Steve Smith says Oritain’s “ultra transparent” system lets his vineyard prove its wines come from different blocks - even if they’re just a few metres apart, and allows a vintage to be verified at any time during the life of the wine - “giving confidence that the supply chain has not delivered a fraudulent wine”.
Cochrane says Oritain will use its success in other fields as a lever - including apparel, where it's been used by the multinational Lacoste to prove it's using high-quality cotton, and not "high-risk" cotton from places with forced labour. That helps its brand reputation and helps the company to meet its environmental and social governance requirements and legal obligations in a world of increasing regulations around origin.
It will also target trend-setters.
"As we have seen from clients in our other markets, we have shown we deliver consistency. For example, our client retention rate is over 90 per cent, showing we can protect and enhance our clients' reputation," Cochrane says.
"While we can be used by all companies across the sector of wine, from the high end such as Pyramid Valley through to bulk producers, what we have found in other industries such as the fashion industry is that the natural early adopters of this technology are always the most innovative brands."
