The fine wine market has long suffered from problems associated with complex product names. “Grange” for example, is widely understood as “Penfolds”, despite there being over 200 wines with “Grange” in their title.
For humans it is possible (although not always) to understand the subject matter. The same cannot be said for computers. Very rarely is the full name of a wine used. Even less frequently is it written or keyed consistently in every system, document or form when fine wine is created, transported, marketed, bought, sold or stored. In fact, details of wine are commonly recorded more than ten times for a single transaction and repeated many times over in the life of a wine.
LWIN – unique seven-digit codes – introduce a simple and consistent naming convention for fine wines into your systems.
Each L-WIN refers to the wine itself (i.e. the producer and brand, grape or vineyard). The first six numbers of the code represent each wine’s unique identifier, while the seventh number is a “check digit” that minimises input errors.
Additional information, such as the vintage, pack and bottle size can be appended to the L-WIN in a standard format, or added as separate fields.
The L-WIN standards for including additional data are:
- L-WIN: 1234567 – Example winery, Cabernet
- L-WIN-11: 12345672012 – Example Winery, Cabernet, 2012
- L-WIN-16: 1234567201200750 – Example Winery, Cabernet, 2012, 750ml bottle size*
- L-WIN-18: 123456720121200750 – Example Winery, Cabernet, 2012, 12 bottles of 750ml
*All bottles sizes are expressed in millilitres in a five-digit format.
Read ‘L-WIN: a common language for fine wine‘ by Liv-ex’s Head of Data, Neil Taylor, to learn more about the role and value of universal identification in the fine wine industry (French and Chinese are available to download as PDFs).
See the case study on how LWIN helped to transform operations at LCB Vinotheque, a warehousing solution for fine wine.
To find out more, or to get started, please contact Neil Taylor (data@liv-ex.com).
