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Australia Adopts EU's Geographical Indicator System For Wine
onreserve writes with an excerpt from a site dedicated to laws affecting wine: "[L]ast week, Australia signed an agreement with the European Union to comply with the geographical indicator (GI) system of the EU. The new agreement replaces an agreement signed in 1994 between the two wine powers and protects eleven of the EU drink labels and 112 of the Australian GI's. Specifically, this means that many of the wine products produced in Australia that were previously labeled according to European names, such as sherry and tokay, will no longer be labeled under these names. Wine producers in Australia will have three years to 'phase out' the use of such names on labels. Australian labels that will be discontinued include amontillado, Auslese, burgundy, chablis, champagne, claret, marsala, moselle, port, and sherry."
I am against geolocation of wine. I think that GNU/Linux users should be able to keep their privacy. Why do I have the feeling that I am off-topic here...
Tokaji is mentioned in the Hungarian National Anthem, written in 1823. What are the Aussies doing with that name?
I don't like the idea much anyway of wine names tied to region names, the grape varietie(s) are more informative and universal. And for novelty wines there are plenty of other names us Aussies can use like "Alice Springs Leg Opener".
Anyway back to my beer...
While they're at it, could those EU guys please teach the Ozzies how to properly pronounce the different types of grapes. While I was down there, it took me a while to understand that kepsev (pronounced with nasal Texan accent) means Cabernet Sauvignon ...
karma police: arrest this man, he talks in maths; he buzzes like a fridge, he's like a detuned radio. [radiohead]
As a college student currently study abroad in Australia (Where all kinds of alcohol *except* wine are ridiculously expensive!) this change doesn't mean much to me. I'm hardly a wine connoisseur though, and while labels like "port", "champagne" and "burgundy" make it easier to identify exactly what a specific kind of wine is, its really just brand recognition. Sounds like both parties stand to benefit financially from this deal, so have at it! ...While the rest of you argue about countries and branding I'll stick to making my own "homebrew" "champagne" from $10 boxed white wine and sprite!
appleguru.org
Because reading the words "Produced in Australia" is too difficult for us Europeans?
Why doesn't the EUSSR do something useful, like getting out of people's lives, instead of coming up with more and more ways to interfere?
Take Nobody's Word For It.
This is ridiculous. If I buy a Chablis or a Burgundy I want a particular type of wine. So what that these wines originated in certain regions in France? I don't give a damn where it was made. I would say most people who drink them don't know or care either. The end result is that if I buy a Chablis in Australia they will need to call it "dry white". This doesn't help consumers, but it does help some wine producers in France trying to get a monopoly. I'm told by a French friend who is a wine buff that the Aussie wines he can buy are superior to French wines (seriously), so this makes the whole thing sound like a ploy to recapture an ailing market.
Banning moselle, port, and sherry? What idiot agreed to this? (BTW I thank OP for not capitalising the first letter of these very generic names.)
I suggest Aussie wine makers label their bottles "Not moselle", "Not port", "Not sherry". Nice way to thumb their noses at certain diary product-eating pacifist primates and the bureaucrats who agreed to this.
I'm not sure what a 2L law student and wine law enthusiast is doing posting to Slashdot, but given the legendary inability of most Slashdotters to gain the attention of the fairer sex, I'd say Lindsey could be a hit!
Move over NYCL, you've met your match. :-)
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Appelation Origin Controlled. It is a standard which emans that not only a specific recept was used, but the product come from a specific region. One can protest against such a label and standard but it is as they exists. When some people buy champagne they *expect* it to come from the region of champagne, and if it comes from california they feel themselves cheated. Personally I agree with you, I care only for the taste not the country it was made in, but some people do, expect AOC label to be respected. IMHO if the label simply said "champagne made in Australia" rather than "champagne" and in extremly small character "made in australia" the problem would not be there. But most of those "made in" are in character pica 5 or 4, that you have to hunt on the bottle. Think "fine print".
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Aussie!
See this is why I stay with Mad Dog 20/20, never changed it's name, never will! (Considering a large portion of its customer base is illiterate and/or too drunk to read anyhow it wouldn't really matter but....)
Monstar L
Decent people drink beer, not wine. And since all good beer comes from Belgium, there is no need for geolocation of names.
P.S.: I know that good beer also comes from other countries, but accounting for that would require a different argument.
The US, Australia, and others have gotten really good at making wines. Good likes winning top awards at international festivals good. This pisses off the French. Wine was supposed to be THEIR thing. When the Americans first started making wine they were supportive because they thought it was cute. "Oh you go and make your cheap wine, it is much worse than ours but it is ok for cheap stuff." Then American wine started beating theirs and they got huffy.
That is somethign that has always perplexed me about alcohol is this bullshit protection of brands by area. For example did you know you can't buy a non-American bourbon? You can buy whiskey from all around the world, but bourbon is only American. This isn't because there is some magic secret to making it, but because it is a protected term for the US. So if you made it somewhere else, you'd have to find another name for it. Doesn't matter if it was 100% the same as American bourbon (which is more or less just a whiskey made with mostly corn and aged in fresh oak barrels) you'd have to find a new name.
All this shit is really stupid if you asked me. Wines should be known by their common names. I don't care if that's where they came from first, that doesn't matter. Any one should be allowed to make any kind of spirit and call it that provided it meets the criteria. The country of origin shouldn't be a criteria, only the process of production.
Don't call your wine a Burgundy if it doesn't come from Burgundy. Doing so would be exploiting someone elses reputation. If your wine is any good, build your own name and compete based on quality instead of mimicking someone else's brand. For example, "Moselle" is not generic. It's the name of a river in France and Germany. Calling a wine Moselle means it comes from that region. If you use a classification based on origin, use it truthfully.
Debian is based on Linux, so lets just rename the whole of Debian Linux and sell it under that name :)
Embrace Extinguish.....
I2P
Look it up.. It will solve your anonymity and encryption problems. It is even possible to connect two computers with firewalls blocking ALL incoming connections using I2P. And yes, you can manage tunnels for ALL TCP traffic through a nice web-interface.
Think of I2P as an anonymous Tor, Hamachi, www, bittorrent, mail, IRC, ssh, socks, httpd-client.
Hint: If you tunnel a privoxy server, you can tunnel anything through that httpd server using only 1 tunnel.. With 1 hop, it will work even though none of your machines have inbound connections..
Point is, such a list could easily be hosted on an anonymous webpage (eepsite in I2P-terms), which anyone can access anonymously within the network. Neither the server or the client's IP address will be known to any adversary without enormous resources and serious work towards it.
Go look up some of the double blind taste test studies done. People aren't nearly as good at telling wines apart when they don't know before hand. Wine snobs (and wine vinters even more especially) like to claim some extremely subtle differences base on the smallest thing, but the scientific evidence isn't there to support it.
Hell if you like, conduct your own experiment. It isn't that hard or expensive. Here's what you do:
1) Buy the wines to be compared. You can either buy a number of wines, or just buy two. If you buy many, you run a test where people rank them from best to worst numerically. If you buy two, buy two that are as similar as possible, but supposedly different, like same grape, same price, different region. You then do an ABX test where people get three glasses labeled A, B and X and are asked which of A or B is the same as X.
2) Assemble a panel of people. You can be on it. Get whoever you think has good taste in wine, it is all up to you. You'll need at least 10 but more is better.
3) Get two people to run the experiment for you.
4) Have person #1 fill glasses with wine, and label them with A, B, C, etc or A, B, X. They randomize what goes in which glass (for best results use a computer for randomization), and record the wine that was placed in each glass on a sheet of paper. You don't get to see it, nobody does. They write down the results only, nobody talks to them. They need to be in a room all by themselves, no peeking.
5) Have person #2 come and serve the wine to the testers, one at a time. They don't talk to person #1, just come and get the wine. They write down the results from the people's tests. Either the numerical rank of each letter, or which of A or B matched X. They can't tell the results to anyone doing the tasting, or to person #1.
6) When all people have finished testing, come and get the two papers. Match up the results to the wine on a spreadsheet.
Doing this, provided it is done properly (as in nobody looks at the papers and the two testers don't communicate) you'll get valid results. There will be no chance knowledge of what was going on could bias the results.
However, don't get mad if the result is "Nobody could tell the difference to a statistically significant amount."
I like the idea of Australia being a major wine power.
Suppose the US, China or Russia tried to attack us, being superior military powers.
We simply get their military drunk, and we win.
He who rules the vine, rules the world! Bwahahaha!
I am anarch of all I survey.
[troll inside. Or not] I wonder ... Why are there so many upper case letters ? I thought only Germans put upper case letters at the beginning of all words. Not English ?
So, why "Australia Adopts EU's Geographical Indicator System For Wine" ?
And then, why only one in "amontillado, Auslese, burgundy, chablis, champagne, claret, marsala, moselle, port, and sherry". I think these words would deserve some, don't you think ?
That's what I've been taught. May be I'm wrong, I'm French ...
[end of troll inside. Or not]
Totof
Now that's an idea. Let FYR Macedonia change name to North Macedonia, it's less of a mouthful and geographically accurate.
Somehow, though, I have my doubts that the Greeks will take to it.
Er... what am I missing here, why the heck is this story even on Slashdot, which is primarily a technology news site?
Does this mean off-licences in Australia will be running a Windows emulation layer?
The fact is this country is producing lots and lots of wine at the moment, to the point of a "wine glut" as it's often referred to. You can buy wines made from excess grapes (clean skins) which are unlabelled and are sometimes great and sometimes not so great.
There are good wines and bad wines made here, as well as in other countries. Spain makes some very nice reds (I quite like Casillero del Diablo). Some white wines in New Zealand taste like cats piss but sell by their brand reputation, but some are quite nice.
The real reason this law is going ahead is that I suspect the EU will try and block or quota Australian wine imports, so they are forcing the arm of the government here. Fine, though the real reason for this naming scheme is that European wines are undercut by cost by many Australian wines by the same "name". Whether or not the Australian wines are better or worse is not the point.
So, English merchants-sailors invent port, madeira, sherry, made them first'class drinks and now their descendants bow to bunch of Brussels bureaucrats? Shame on Aussie's government. Just waiting for Russians to nuke everyone trying to put Vodka on their bottles (Poles, you are first in line!:) And for those who want to drink exactly what they read - it is much more sh*tty port, sherry, chablis, and, lately, cognac originated in "designated" places then in Australia. Those "protecting" are degenerated descendants of once great producers that trying to save money streams after loosing their skills. Moreover - it is already questionable whether they make the wines corresponding to their names. With temperature ever rising you cant get grapes not the same condition as it was 100/200/300 years ago when name got established. Who knows, in 20 years welsh or norvegian Cab/Merlo can be better for good claret that tiny grapes from the Garonne desert I like the idea on noport, nochablis, nof!@#gparmigiano. BTW - AUPorto would work even better:) Winemakers should care people buying their wine, not the name. No one would consider chianti to be a good wine only because it has that word on the bottle, Italians let the name to go down the drain with no other nation interference.
Some products clearly have a geographical origin, and it makes sense to ensure that people cannot "lie" to consumers. For example, "Swiss cheese" really ought to be made in Switzerland.
On the other hand, the idea that there can be "only one" place sometimes leads to ridiculous results. There is a small town in Switzerland named "Champagne". That's been the town's name for hundreds of years, and they make an average-quality white wine. They are no longer allowed to label their white wine with the name of their town, because the name "Champagne" is reserved for the region in France that makes fizzy white wine.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Th next step is to re-label all Australian beer 'Fosters'
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
I haven't seen an Australian made wine called champagne, chablis, burgundy or claret in many longs years.
... though I am a GPL fan and against geolocation. ;)
If the wine is marked according to the grape, like Merlot or Syrah, or so, fine. If it says something that has locally specific production procedures, or stems from a specific location, I am very much for disallowing fake labels. I think the so-called 'Budweiser' has been mentioned. Except of the name, it has nothing at all to do with the original. Therefore it is misleading, over, and the consumer ought not be mislead.
Some wines have specifics, as well as cheese. Like Roquefort, which ripens under a specific situation, in a specific cave.
Jerez - actually what made it into Sherry, because the British find it difficult to pronounce Spanish names - has some specifics in its taste that cannot easily been reproduced by inputting some nondescript white wine. Gewürztraminer is another one - though I don't like white wines - in my list. Drank some in Perth, Australia once, and found it unbearable. Just plugging whatever fantasy names there are on the bottle, and off you go? No, as someone who does like red wine, it is even worse for me. A Bordeaux is distinctly different from a Beaujolais Nouveau, and when I buy one, I have a desire to enjoy a distinct taste to which I was looking forward when I bought it. And I want to have this privilege in future as well, even more so. I don't mind at all those crazy and fantastic names for wines that are sold left and right where we live, the 'Night Train', 'Red River' and likewise stuff. But when I buy a St. Emilion, I want a St. Emilion. Anything else is cheating; and I am somewhat astonished that a number of comments in here do not feel likewise. It is not much different from computers: if I buy an intel, I want neither an AMD nor a Via; and if I buy a Via, I don't want an Intel i3.
And don't come with all those silly 'double-blind tests'. Should I do likewise, and state: "If you can't distinguish the speeds of two computers, subjectively, (like with the wines), you are not entitled to obtain the type of CPU that you ordered"? When I buy an Intel Core i5 661, that's what I'm entitled to get. Irrespective of my ability to count the pins and measure the clock frequency. And when I buy a Champagne, I want explicitly a product that has been produced according to a very specific and distinct method; not some sparkling white wine with added carbon dioxide.
This must be a clever joke. The story contains elements of things that would make up a typical Slashdot story: intellectual property rights, EU regulators, Australia, restraint of speech, and products with a fanatically devoted following that no one else gives a shit about.
The punchline? The story is about a beverage produced by technologies that are several millennia old.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Here's an excellent rendition of Monty Python's sketch on Australian Table Wines (originally from "Monty Python's Previous Record"), done by RuudeBoyProductions. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4GvN4wGUZI
--
.nosig
You can't make cola and call it Coca Cola if you're not Coca Cola. That's even true if you happen to live in a town called Coca del Cola.
You just pick another name instead of trying to trick the customer.
Where the wine was produced makes a lot of difference to the taste
Well that might or might not be true, but that's not quite the purpose of AOC. They're very much like Trade Marks, which don't guarantee that Coca Cola(TM) will taste good but that it's really made by Coca Cola, inc. Here we're not talking about one company owning one trade mark, it's more of a collective ownership and responsibility, between the producers and people living in the area. You can't buy that "trade mark", except in as much that you can buy a property there. Just like a trade mark, if bad Champagne is sold it impacts all of them and risks ruinig their investment, so they an incentive to get their shit together.
Calling "Champagne" something that's not from there is similar to trademark infringement, trying to cash in on someone else's popularity, while endagering their reputation for your benefit.
nt
Port is the literal translation of the name of the city where the wine is bottled, Porto (it actually means that, as in a ship's port).
Then why can't any wine bottled in a city noted for its seaport, such as Oakland, be labeled as "port wine"?
If the name of the wine is usurped freely, uninformed consumers merely looking for "port wine" will buy the fake, more widely marketed stuff
That sounds a lot like the rationale behind trademarks, and in fact, the Idaho Potato Commission has used U.S. trademark law to protect the "GROWN IN IDAHO" designation of origin for potatoes. But these still have generic names: "Russet Burbank potato" for french-fry cultivars and "Maris Piper potato" for cultivars used for crisps. Imitators of the drug TYLENOL® describe their products as "APAP", "acetaminophen", or "paracetamol" pain relievers, all generic names for their active ingredient. Miller Lite is a "golden beer" or "light pale lager beer" and not a PILSNER®, and imitation Champagne is a "twice fermented sparkling wine". So come up with a generic term that encompasses both PORT® wine and its imitators, and I'll deal.
please go back to drinking Budweiser.
Anheuser-Busch or Czechvar, as others have pointed out?
You can't buy a Macintosh from Hewlett-Packard, can you?
Yet the PCs made by Hewlett-Packard were once referred to as "IBM compatible" until Lenovo bought IBM's PC division half a decade ago. So are we supposed to refer to imitations of CHABLIS® wine as "Chablis compatible"?
What's the beef with claret? Mentioned in Chaucer 1374 C.E. (as 'clarre'): a mixture of wine, clarified honey, and medicinal spices, Never, ever, been a regional name. OED has from 1300 the contrast between 'wine clarre and wine Greek' (would the latter be retsina?) Brussels, where the Nuts come from.
What it showed the world is that the US only cares about trademarks when it's to their benefit.
This is true. I recall a few years ago when the EU's appellation rules were being enforced. There was an interview with a douchbag former VC wine Napa Valley "investor" who was "incensed" that the EU was restraining his trade by limiting what he could call his wine during export. Everything was going swimmingly until the EU winemaker, who had as usual been dumped on by the US interviewer and the douchbag for being some kind of crypto-socialist, produced a bottled wine variety with the appellation of "NAPA VALLEY" in huge letters, and in tiny letters "China", telling them he had bought it at a trade show a few weeks ago. Needless to say, the Napa Valley douchbag didn't think this was fair *at all*, and wanted a stop to this sort of thing.
Pot, meet kettle.
Da Blog
Sounds like a case of sour grapes on the EU's part.
Makes sense to me, for most things anyway. I've tried most of the Australian 'ports' that are sold where I live (Canada); not a single one of 'em tastes as good as, or even very much like, a proper Portuguese vintage or tawny port. They're just not the same thing at all. Ditto with the similar stuff produced in other countries (including Canada), actually, but those can't be called port as those countries have the relevant agreements with the EU too...
The others I can understand, but: Auslese? This is a production technique, not a location.
Whoever labeled you "insightful"?
You missed the whole point and just ranted about your so called superior wines and anti-French sentiments. Your whole post is a troll!
You do realize this has no impact on the wines sold in Australia or outside Europe? This is in regards to wines from Australia that are to be sold in the European Union!
The EU decides what names they may carry there, that's reasonable, and it applies to all producing countries including France.
Protected names are reserved for specific regions of each country of origin.
This does help consumers by assuring them that cheap knock offs may not abuse centuries old names and traditions. The products are what they say they are. They come from the advertised region or country.
French producers in general don't like this any more than Italians or Bulgarians. French Champagne is only produced in a small patch of land, the producers in the surrounding area are not eligible to call their products "Champagne".
It applies similarly to products of all kinds in each and every European Union country. From Hungarian Tokai to German sausages. This has nothing to do with France you dimwitted fool!
What monopoly does France have on other countries' products!!! Your whole reasoning is pointless and stupid.
Australian wine makers may label their bottles "Not wine" all they like in Australia, but they may not sell it under registered and reserved names in Europe. End of story.