The International Standard Wine Number or ISWN, similar to the ISBN for books, is a coding scheme intended to give a unique identifier

Unique identifier

With reference to a given set of objects, a unique identifier is any identifier which is guaranteed to be unique among all identifiers used for those objects and for a specific purpose...

 for each wine

Wine

Wine is an alcoholic beverage, made of fermented fruit juice, usually from grapes. The natural chemical balance of grapes lets them ferment without the addition of sugars, acids, enzymes, or other nutrients. Grape wine is produced by fermenting crushed grapes using various types of yeast. Yeast...

 worldwide. The ISWN system has a consistent unique code for each wine producer (ISWN-P), each wine brand or product (ISWN-W), each vintage

Vintage

Vintage, in wine-making, is the process of picking grapes and creating the finished product . A vintage wine is one made from grapes that were all, or primarily, grown and harvested in a single specified year. In certain wines, it can denote quality, as in Port wine, where Port houses make and...

 variant of a wine product (ISWN-V), and the bottle variants (ISWN-B). The ISWN is allocated by the ISWN Organization on the basis of a global reference database of wine producers and wines worldwide. The database is improved through wine producers updating their own data with the ISWN Manager module. The ISWN Organization is a Non-profit organization

Non-profit organization

Nonprofit organization is neither a legal nor technical definition but generally refers to an organization that uses surplus revenues to achieve its goals, rather than distributing them as profit or dividends...

sponsored by the wine industry.