AVIN: An ISBN for Wines

Adegga, the social wine site, is doing a lot of cool stuff. But perhaps the greatest contribution that the smart folks at Adegga have made to the world of winedom is the creation of the AVIN: a universal code for wines, like the International Standard Book Number (ISBN) for books.

[from AVIN - An ISBN for Wines]

What is the AVIN?

The AVIN is a unique code for wine. Think of it as an ISBN for wine.

The AVIN was created out of necessity to organize the myriad of online wine information that we wanted to track at Adegga and to then make that information available in specific and useful ways. We found out that too often two different wine names actually referred to the same wine and this was a big issue in terms of information. For this the reason we decided to create a unique identifying code for each wine.

AVIN stands for Adegga Vin Identification Number and it was originally based on the work done by Ulla-Maria on Thinglink and by Amazon on the ASIN.

Would be very helpful if wine makers begain putting these codes on their labels, just like book publishers do.

But shouldn’t the name be ISWN to follow the pattern of ISBN?