The ISBN for wines, AVIN hits the 30 million wine labels

30 million wine labels that include wine name, region and varietals, along with other data, on a QR code, from 150 different wine producers – that’s the milsetone recently hit by AVIN, an “ISBN for wines” cataloging system.

AVIN is a unique 13 digit number, acting like an open standard and used for tracking wine, for over 25,000 different wines from 7,500 wineries. It’s been sponsored and financially supported for over three years now by Adegga (a wine social network).

With the AVIN, wine producers get their product information on a small QR Code, where consumers, with any smartphone and one click, will get other Adegga social network  consumers review about the wine, turning the buying decision a social experience, with more detail, real information.

We had a recent talk with André Ribeirinho, AVIN founder, where he told us that AVIN is building up a board of wine producers people to assure that the project will be sustained in the future, along with the needed independence to run it. Also André thinks that the QR Code, one of the two ways to represent the AVIN,  will be a non issue on the near future due to the widespread use in Europe and USA.

AVIN was created due to the fact that the bar code, already present on every bottle, isn’t unique – since different years have the same bar code – and it couldn’t retain essential wine information neither it’s web friendly. So, with a smartphone you can scan and extract information from the wine label itself. Wineries will be able to create and change their own code database information, through the AVIN API which will be soon public.