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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."
Please, learn to spell Aussie before telling us how we should pronounce things. Oh, and if anyone was pronouncing 'Cab Sav' as 'kepsev' it's most likely you were in South Africa, rather than Australia.
We make some of the worlds best red wines, we are quite comfortable with our pronunciation.
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.
As it is, the Greeks really have no business telling any other country what name they should be using, especially when the ancient Macedonia is pretty much evenly divided between Greece and Macedonia. It's not as if Macedonia is calling itself Greece... Here's an idea: let's listen to North and South Korea bicker over who has a legitimate right to use the name Korea.
Or to clarify: If an australian vineyard is fermenting a "Tokay" wine, they should clearly label what they are doing.
Are they fermenting an Aszú? An Aszúeszencia? A Forditás?
Tokay is really only the place where the wine was fermented, it tells you nothing about the actual type of wine you are drinking. Labelling something "Tokay" is thus misleading, if it doesn't come from Tokay. That would be like a chinese toymaker selling stuff under the label "Made in U.S.".
This applies to all regions, not just French ones, which is why I can only buy cheddar from Cheddar and sandwiches from Sandwich. Oh, wait.
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.
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'm also disappointed at the ban on the name "port". I rarely drink but when I do it's usually port. Next time I feel like a bottle I won't know what to buy!
This is spot-on. The move to restrict names that originated as place names but have become style descriptors is ridiculous, IMO, and the decisions about what is protected and what isn't are purely political with no regard as to actual genericization.
It makes no sense that "Parmesan", "Sangria", and "Champagne" are geographically restricted but "Cheddar" and "Philadelphia cream cheese" aren't.
Champagne, Switzerland has been producing wine since before Dom Perignon came up with his method of making sparkling wine, but they're not allowed to label it as "Champagne"--that's because everyone knows "Champagne" is a word indicating a particular style, and calling the Swiss (non-sparkling) wine "Champagne" would confuse consumers.
Once you've recognized that, restricting the name by geography is ludicrous.
These laws actually serve to confuse consumers, not to help them--things like "port" are style descriptors in the English language. The right thing to do is to require actual claims of geography to be accurate (already the case) and let Duoro label their port as "Made in Duoro", Jerez label their Sherry as "Made in Jerez", etc.
rage, rage against the dying of the light
The current system, where any wine producer can just stick any place name on their wine, doesn't make sense.
It'd be like seeing something labeled "Scottish salmon", when in fact it was caught and processed in Norway.
That's not the current system, If you labeled salmon caught in Norway as Scottish, then you would be breaking the law. Wine names have never meant that the wine came from a specific region, you have to label where your wine is coming from(which is a much more common-sense way to figure out where wine is coming from).
I'm glad that common sense is being imposed. Not that I care very much really, but I'm certainly not against such an outbreak of common sense.
Common-sense is imposing the meaning of words from a group of self-important countries half-way around the world on your citizens?
No, not really. The whole "Champagne" battle between the EU and the US a few years ago just left everyone thinking it was the US that were the assholes. Champagne comes from champagne. End of story. Want to make a similar style somewhere else? Call it after your own region, make your own name instead of piggybacking on someone else's hard work.
What it showed the world is that the US only cares about trademarks when it's to their benefit. Which is fine, but if its citizens could stop pretending to live in a free and fair nation, the rest of us will get off your backs.
Mb the winemaker can learn from the toymaker ... Designed in Hungary, Made in Australia?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
The problem is that I, as a casual consumer, cannot know the dozens of varieties available on the market. I might think that Australian port is my favorite, but how am I supposed to find that product on a shelf after the name change? The product is "port," I've never thought of that as a Brand name. The industry has done a fairly good job communicating to the public that "sparkling wine" and "champagne" are analogous, but what's their strategy for teaching me new names for all these--"Auslese, burgundy, chablis, claret, marsala, moselle, port, and sherry"? I don't know if I have the spare bandwidth in my brain to absorb all that, especially since I don't go to a liquor store for wines more than three or four times per year and thus don't have a lot of exposure to this information.
There's a perfect xkcd for my sig but I'm too lazy to look it up. sudo someone go find it.
I'd agree up to a point; conversely though, in parts of the world where names are unrestricted - like the US - it is possible to buy parmesan cheese (for example) that bears no relationship whatsoever to what we know as Parmesan cheese. It's simply a hard cheddar which is nothing like its namesake, and that to my mind is verging on fraud. There are plenty other examples as well.
[FUCK BETA]
Even if they are using the grapes from Tokay in Australia, the soil is different. The soil has a noticeable effect on the wine produced, even if the grapes and methods are the same, so restrictions on regional names make sense.
Except that last time I read about this just a few weeks ago it seemed like the wine "experts" couldn't notice that it was the same white wine when they compared the same white wine to the same one with added color making it look red ... Personally I want to add that I somewhat doubt the taste of the actual color is 100% out of the equation.
Also the same wine in old/beautiful bottles also tasted better than when it wasn't in the same bottles ..
And there was some comparision of French and Californian wines where the later won or whatever.
I don't care much, I don't like wine.
Chances however are that it's close to 100% snobbery and just the knowledge of knowing you have a more expensive product in your glass. The goal for anyone drinking wine, beer or liquor should be to get drunk.
I can taste the difference of chocolate or flavored teas. I wouldn't be so sure / seriously doubt it was far as noticing a difference on growing location thought. Rather processing, amount of sugar, flavorings, eventually kind of bean in the chocolate case.
As I would notice if I drank a gin with cranberry juice and ruschian added to it instead of a vodka with orange juice ... :D
Taste the difference of the grains? Doubt it :D
I was wondering how many comments I would have to read before getting to this joke. You have made Slashdot proud.
RETURN without GOSUB in line 1050
VB? That's a little too posh for NT. Remember kids, Australia is also the home of Chateau Cardboard, the good ol' Goon Box. If you can't get it in a 4L flagon, it's not worth having.
You're somewhat wrong.
In Europe, wine names such as "Tokaj", "Chianti", "Port", "Champagne" and many others have been trademarks bound, by law, to specific regions and types of grape and even production methods. Some of these parameters are so narrowly defined that winemakers from those regions sometimes opt to skip the protected trademark in order to have more freedom in their wine making.
Some of these legal protection schemes go back to the 18th century: Chianti in 1717, Tokaj in 1730, Port in 1756.
Champagne is much more recent, only being legally defined in 1927.
That said, I really do understand that citizens from non-European countries, who are quite accustomed to use these words in a more generic sense, think it's wrong to suddenly take these words from the public domain and make them into protected trademarks.
Created MTV.
They get to sell liquor in the EU.
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