Chianti Employs AI to Combat Fakes 

Artificial intelligence is making its way deeper into the wine industry, moving beyond the vineyard and the cellar and into combating fake wines. 

Regional wine consortia are now turning to AI and digital monitoring tools to sift through the internet’s vast volume of content and flag counterfeit products and unauthorized use of appellation names.

Among them is the Chianti Wine Consortium (Consorzio Vino Chianti), which is using artificial intelligence and other digital tools to scan the global internet for counterfeit Chianti wine and improper use of the “Chianti” name.

The effort falls under a framework established by Italian Ministerial Decree No. 685310, issued by Italy’s Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Forestry on December 18, 2025. Under that decree, the consortium has launched a systematic digital brand-protection program aimed at combating online misuse, counterfeiting and improper use of the Chianti name.

The project began on February 1, 2026, and monitoring will run through the end of the year, covering the entire internet with no geographic limits, according to the consortium. It is set to close on January 20, 2027, at which point all findings will be published on the consortium’s website and made freely available to businesses in the industry.

The consortium got an early sense of what that monitoring would turn up in January, when its digital tools surfaced a range of suspected violations. Among the more striking finds, reported by the Italian outlet La Nazione on September 15, were wine kits that let buyers “make” their own Chianti at home – just add water to a powder mix and shake.

That kind of product, along with other misuses of the Chianti name, is now squarely in the consortium’s sights as it deploys AI and advanced software to track down violations.

The monitoring effort targets three main fronts, according to the consortium’s project plan. On major e-commerce platforms, it looks for goods that amount to counterfeiting, unfair competition or unauthorized use of the Chianti trademark, and requests their removal. On social media including Facebook, Instagram, X and TikTok, it hunts for content that infringes intellectual property, counterfeit products and fake accounts. And across the wider internet, in search engines and domain registries, it searches out websites and domains using the Chianti name without authorization and pushes for the offending content to come down.

More Than 2,500 Suspected Violations Found

Chianti is one of Tuscany’s flagship wine regions. Its DOCG appellation spans parts of the provinces of Florence, Siena, Arezzo, Pisa, Prato and Pistoia, built around Sangiovese as its signature grape. For producers, the name is more than a place on a map – it’s a protected geographical indication and a commercial asset whose value reaches into markets around the world.

As Chianti’s brand power has grown, so has the range of counterfeiting built around its name –  no longer confined to fake wine, labels and bottling, but now spilling over into the internet as well.

That spillover shows up starkly in the numbers: the consortium’s January report found more than 2,500 suspected violations online over the previous six months, spread across 411 websites. The violations ranged from counterfeit labels to unauthorized use of the Chianti name on other goods — beyond the make-your-own wine kits, items like clothing and wine glasses turned up bearing the Chianti name without permission. The consortium describes this monitoring and enforcement push as now a core part of its brand-protection work.

Alessio Mugnaini, mayor of Montespertoli and head of the local association of municipalities who also serves as the agricultural affairs representative for the National Association of Italian Municipalities (ANCI) struck a note of cautious optimism about the technology. AI, he said, will likely do for the industry what software generally has: help people get more done, faster and better. But he added that using it well is another matter, one that may call for some kind of formal training or qualification, since people still need to know how to make sense of what the AI turns up.

Consortium president Giovanni Busi said the system is designed to catch counterfeits, unfair competition and improper use of the Chianti trademark, pointing to the powder-and-water kits as a telling example of just how far misuse of a protected wine name can travel online.