Unlocking transparency: the role of blockchain technology in the wine supply chain

The wine sector is one of the most relevant sectors in the world, with a global wine consumption estimated at 232 million hectoliters in 2022. It is also characterized by counterfeit products, fragmentation of supply networks, and several small-scale wine producers, leading to challenges in transparency and traceability. Consumers are increasingly interested in obtaining reliable and verifiable information about products, especially those related to sustainability issues. In this context, Blockchain Technology (BT), being a decentralized ledger, could ensure transparency and traceability of information regarding the wine supply chain. BT is progressively integrated with Supply Chain Management in different sectors to create a technologically and simultaneously interconnected system. However, its applications to manage data and information aimed at assessing the sustainable performance of a wine product life cycle have not been widely addressed yet. Moreover, it is well known that Life Cycle Thinking methodologies suffer of a lack of primary data related to the analysed products. BT could be used to collect input and output related to the life cycle of a wine product, provide reliable information to consumers, obtain more information on the social responsibility of suppliers/customers, track over time the social and environmental performance of a wine supply chain. The main limitation of building a wine blockchain to track environmental and social data along the supply chain lies in the collaboration level among the involved actors. This study aims investigating the use of BT within the wine sector and, consequently, to understand which data and information could be tracked by BT to support the assessment of the social and environmental impact of a product.