Mixing up wines can lead to expensive errors, as one merchant in China recently found out. According to an article in the drinks business, a salesperson in China erroneously gave a customer a bottle of Lafite Rothschild instead of Carruades Lafite. The Grand Cru sells for around 2.5 times the price of the second wine, as a recent study by Liv-ex showed, making this a costly mistake.
According to the article, and another report in the Chinese news site WBO, the customer had already drunk the wine by the time the store phoned up to recall it.
Mistakes like this are easy to make. Wine names and labels are often quite similar to each other. Carruades Lafite and Lafite Rothschild are not the only example. Petrus and Petrus Gaia – both estates in Bordeaux – retail at radically different prices. The risk is even higher in regions like Burgundy where wine names are long and complex.
One solution, which has been adopted by many major wine merchants, warehouses and publications is LWIN, the Liv-ex Wine Identification Number. Like ISBN for books, it standardises wine names to short seven or eleven (to include the vintage) digit codes. This helps to eliminate errors, as well as facilitating the automatic exchange of information about fine wines. Antonio Galloni recently described LWIN as, “a significant contribution to the world of fine wine”.
LWIN is completely free to use, and the dictionary of codes can be downloaded from our website. You can find out more about it here, or contact Daria Ershova with any questions.
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