U-Label is one of the best-known names in wine e-labeling. It began as an industry initiative from the European wine and spirits trade associations, CEEV and spiritsEUROPE, and in 2024 it partnered with Scantrust, a QR-code technology provider, to run the platform as U-Label by Scantrust. Glasswise takes a different route, built around design and data ownership for independent wineries.
Disclosure: This article is written by the Glasswise team. We encourage you to evaluate both platforms yourself.
U-Label by Scantrust is built for the whole EU drinks industry at scale: wine, spirits, and aromatized wine, from small producers to large houses managing thousands of references. Glasswise is built for independent wineries where the e-label carries the brand.
U-Label's strength is reach and standardization. It comes from the trade associations, tracks regulatory change centrally, and offers enterprise features like serialized QR codes, anti-counterfeiting, and distributor traceability. For a large catalogue across drink categories, that institutional backing is reassuring.
Glasswise stays close to one job: making a winery's mandatory e-label feel like part of the brand. Every label is designed to match your winery, the wine data stays yours in a central hub, and the QR code doubles as a channel back to the people who scan the bottle.
How does pricing compare?
U-Label charges in tiers that grow with the number of e-labels you publish, so a larger catalogue moves you up the plans. Glasswise charges one predictable annual price for unlimited e-labels, users, and updates. Which one works out cheaper depends on how many wines you carry and how fast that list grows.
We break the math down in the true cost of per-label e-label pricing. The short version is that per-label models look cheap at three wines and add up quickly at fifty, and most wineries add a wine or two every vintage.
How do the design options differ?
U-Label offers template-based customization with a real-time preview and custom domains, tuned for consistency across a large catalogue. Glasswise treats design as the core of the product. Each e-label is built as a bespoke page in your winery's colors, typography, imagery, and story, closer to a landing page than a filled-in form.
What does Glasswise do that U-Label doesn't?
Three things stand out. You own your wine data in a central hub and can export it whenever you want. The QR redirect keeps resolving for the life of the wine because the GS1 identity is yours. And every scan can open a marketing and loyalty layer instead of a static fact sheet. All of it is wine-native rather than adapted from a multi-category compliance tool.
The data hub means your producer-verified information sits in one place you control. Update a wine once and every label reflects it, and if you ever move on, the data comes with you. Because you hold the GS1 Digital Link identity, the QR codes already printed on your bottles keep working even if you change plans, so you are never tied to one vendor's redirect.
Scan with Glasswise turns the mandatory QR code into a channel worth having. The person holding your bottle can find tasting notes, your other wines, and a reason to stay in touch, rather than reading an energy table and closing the tab. Because Glasswise is built for wine and for the German-speaking market first, the workflow, the language, and the support speak your world rather than a generic drinks-and-food standard.
Feature comparison
| Feature | U-Label (Scantrust) | Glasswise |
|---|
| Built for | Wine, spirits, aromatized wine, all sizes | Independent wineries |
| Pricing model | Tiers by label volume | One annual price, unlimited |
| Custom brand design | Template customization | Full bespoke design |
| Bulk operations | Yes | Yes |
| GS1 Digital Link | Yes | Yes |
| 24 EU languages | Yes | Yes |
| Serialized QR codes | Yes | No |
| Anti-counterfeiting | Yes | No |
| Distributor traceability | Yes | No |
| Central wine-data hub, yours to export | No | Yes |
| Marketing QR redirect | No | Yes (Scan with Glasswise) |
| Done-for-you e-label setup | No | Yes |
| QR code guarantee | Not specified | For the life of the wine |
Which one is right for you?
Choose U-Label by Scantrust if you manage a large or multi-category catalogue, need serialized QR codes or anti-counterfeiting, or want distributor traceability across the supply chain.
Choose Glasswise if you are an independent winery that wants the e-label to carry your brand, values owning your wine data, prefers one predictable annual price, or wants the QR code to work as a marketing channel.
How do you switch from U-Label to Glasswise?
Switching does not mean reprinting a single bottle. You keep the GS1 identity and QR codes you already have, repoint them to your new Glasswise labels, and bring your wine data across. Most wineries are live within a season, with the old labels still resolving the whole time.
The path is straightforward:
- Keep your existing GS1 Digital Link and printed QR codes exactly as they are.
- Rebuild your wine data in Glasswise, or hand it over and let the team set it up for you.
- Repoint the QR redirect to the Glasswise labels once you have checked them.
- Retire the old plan after the redirect is live, with nothing to reprint.
The mechanics are the same whichever provider you leave, and we walk through them in how to switch e-label provider without reprinting QR codes.
The bottom line
U-Label brings the weight of the trade associations and enterprise tooling for producers who need scale and supply-chain features. Glasswise brings wine-native design, data you own outright, and a QR code that markets for you. If your bottle is your brand and you want to keep it that way, Glasswise is built for exactly that.
See Glasswise pricing or read the true cost of per-label e-label pricing. For the wider field, compare all wine e-label providers for 2026.
