A lookup
A QR code opens the château's own page — vintage, cuvée, marketing. Useful, but siloed and centrally controlled.
Non-profit · Public good · Open standard
The ledger of
the world's great wines.
A neutral public registry where every prestigious bottle carries a producer-signed digital title — verifiable by anyone, owned privately by its keeper, and permanently retired the moment the bottle is opened.
So an authentic empty bottle can never again be refilled and resold.
“The labels were real. The corks were real. The bottles were real. Only the wine was fake — and nothing in the system could tell the difference.”
The landmark FBI case against the era's most prolific wine forger exposed a structural gap the trade has never closed: there is no neutral, tamper-evident, public record of who owns a bottle and whether it still exists. Livre des Crus closes that gap.
What exists vs. what's missing
The wine world authenticates bottles.
It cannot track title.
A title registry
A neutral record of ownership and existence that no single party can rewrite. That is the whole point of Livre des Crus.
“Already drunk?”
Today, unknowable. With a one-way burn at opening, a consumed bottle is provably dead — forever.
The life of a bottle
Mint. Transfer. Consume.
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Mint — at the château
The producer signs the bottle into existence with two codes: a public code on the outside, and a secret code embedded in the metal seal. Only the producer can mint — forgers cannot create genuine titles.
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Transfer — privately, safely
Title moves from one private owner to another through escrow and a “received” handshake. For investment wine, the bottle stays in a bonded vault and only the title travels.
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Consume — a one-way burn
Opening the bottle reveals the secret code. Scanning it permanently retires the title. The bottle is provably consumed on a public record — and the empty is worthless to a counterfeiter.
The one hard truth
A ledger makes the record unforgeable. It does not, by itself, prove the record belongs to this physical bottle. That binding is done by tamper-evident hardware — a secure chip in the metal seal, destroyed when the seal is cut, applied at the château. We treat the hardware as part of the protocol.
Join the registry
Built for producers, the trade, and collectors.
A neutral public good, openly governed. Specific partners announced soon.