Real-time monitoring of wine temperature in international shipments? It is now possible

For the millions of bottle shipments that leave Italy each year bound for customers and distributors around the world, there has always been the problem of monitoring the condition of the wine, which must not be subjected to major changes in light and temperature that could compromise its quality: today Tenute del Cerro (an agricultural company of the Unipol Group that includes Fattoria del Cerro in Monepulciano, La Poderina in Montalcino, Tenuta di Monterufoli in Pisano, Colpetrone in Montefalco and Montecorona in Umbria) has developed an innovative technology that - thanks to a special device applied to the packaging - allows not only to know, in real time, the position of the shipment, but also to assess any thermal variations and light irradiation.
“Together with the Chief Innovation Officer Department, a UnipolSai Assicurazioni business unit deputed to scouting for innovative solutions”, says Antonio Donato, managing director of Tenute del Cerro, “we intercepted and tested a solution that would allow us to control and keep track of certain parameters that are fundamental to guaranteeing the integrity of our products during shipments”.
The technology consists of a small device that is placed between the cartons of a pallet of wine and then programmed by setting alarm thresholds. Once the journey begins, the instrument, which hooks into GPS networks, monitors temperature and light irradiance and continues to record even when there is no signal.
“If parameters are detected that exceed the set thresholds, the device alerts us”, explains Francesco Ceccarelli, Tenute del Cerro trade marketing manager, “by sending an email reporting the date and time when the recorded values deviated from the optimal ones. The need arose as a result of some difficulties encountered on international shipments, especially for those bound for Asian countries: in fact, due to the changed temperature conditions during the passage of the cargo in complex areas such as the Tropics, we detected alterations in product quality. And so we decided to look for a technological solution that would allow us to track the shipments of our product”.
After all, innovation in logistics is one of the strengths of Tenute del Cerro, which produces a total of 1.5 million bottles each year on its estates and which, in the past few months, inaugurated Le Cerraie, a 10-million-euro cellar-hub in Montepulciano, built with green materials and advanced technologies, which will be dedicated to bottling, labeling, aging and storing wine from Tenute del Cerro’s entire production.