Cardano Comes to Georgian TV with Andrew Thornhill from Baia’s Wine
Written by @elliothill at the Cardano Foundation
In December 2020, we announced that the Cardano Foundation, in association with supply chain technology provider Scantrust, were preparing to deploy the live version of a supply chain tracking solution with Georgian organic wine producer, Baia’s Wines.
The solution, which leverages transactional metadata on the Cardano blockchain, is the first enterprise use case of its kind on Cardano to authenticate and verify from third parties supply chain data. You can read more about the integration, Baia’s Wine, and how transactional metadata on Cardano empowers this solution in this article.
But here, we’re going to share how Baia’s Wine’s Andrew Thornhill took to Georgian TV and further spread Cardano to the Caucasus region. Appearing on the Public Broadcaster of Georgia’s channel 1TV, Andrew sat down with Efes International Corporate Affairs Director, Nikoloz Khundzakishvili, and host Nika Mukbaniani, to discuss what opportunities the Cardano Foundation’s metadata connector could have for industries across Georgia.
Andrew Thornhill is a serial entrepreneur with deep links to the country of Georgia. He works with the Baia’s Wine team to integrate cutting-edge blockchain technology with the 8,000-year-old tradition of winemaking in Georgia. We’ve included some of Andrew’s interview responses here in English, but you can watch the full Georgian version (with subtitles) here if you’re interested!
Using Cardano for Proof of Wine
Asked why Georgia is a perfect country to roll out Cardano technology, and the future potential of blockchain, Andrew explained:
“That is a great question, I mean how exciting is it, that Cardano—the best technology blockchain and one of the world’s largest blockchains—picked Georgia to be one of the very very first implementations of their Metadata project for supply chain traceability! We use the terms ‘blockchain’ and ‘metadata’, but many don’t know what these words mean, many don’t know what blockchain really is—which is one of the reasons why this project with the Cardano Foundation, Scantrust, and Baia’s Wine is so incredible, this project is something that we can see and we can feel and we can hold. With this project, you can hold the bottle in your hand and you can see everything that is happening—it’s an implementation of extremely high technology and, in a way, this project shows us directly some of what we don’t understand [about blockchain].
We know that Georgian wine is amazing, we know that sometimes people try to fake Georgian wine, and we want to know more about the winemakers themselves. And this little piece of technology that’s completely backed by technology from Cardano and Scantrust will allow us to do all these things. With just one simple piece of blockchain technology you can just hold up your smartphone to the bottle and you can know that the bottle is authentic, you can know more about the wine, and know more about the winemakers.”
Discussing when the supply chain tracking solution for Baia’s Wines would be available, and how consumers could track bottles through the Cardano blockchain, Andrew answered:
“Today! So, when we were invited here on the show, the Cardano Foundation was very excited about this news and we kind of fast tracked the program a little bit so the program was officially launched this morning [Friday 2 April], the blockchain data was moved from testnet to mainnet, and I have the bottles backstage. I brought it for you actually, you will have two of the very first bottles from Baia’s Wine embedded with Cardano’s technology.”
Looking to the future of Cardano’s use in the wider Georgian wine industry, the hosts asked if this live pilot with Baia’s Wine could be used as a role model for the whole Georgian wine industry. Andrew agreed, saying:
“Absolutely. So I’ll be honest: Cardano does not pay me any money, I love the technology, I love the group, there is likely an enterprise application available to be developed for this and I hopefully will be speaking with the Georgian wine agency. But I want to be clear, I was a lot more excited about giving someone a piece of blockchain that they can see, they can look at, they can touch, and understand. And yes, a hundred percent, there is a real need for this application and for blockchain in the wine world and in Georgia and the world.”
Cardano for Georgia
Thank you Andrew for your ambassadorship of the Cardano blockchain, and for spreading our technology throughout Georgia! We can’t wait to see what future projects are powered by the Cardano blockchain in this region. This is one of the first live enterprise use cases for Cardano, and we are delighted to see the human angle and the impact it’s having on an ancient industry.
If you would like to learn more about Baia’s Wine, please visit their website here. The Baia’s Wine team have kindly included more information on our integration with Scantrust to preserve their wine supply chain, which we think is a great read! You can read the Scantrust case study about Baia’s Wine and their use of Cardano metadata here. Thank you from everyone at the Cardano Foundation.
Read more about the Cardano Foundation’s transactional metadata and supply chain solutions here: