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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...
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]
In reality you could just label everything "Plonk", have the grapes/location/year(s) in small text for those interested, and people would still buy it.
It's mostly an attempt to con people with that whole "terroir" nonsense. I drink Loire sparkling wine because it's made with the same technique as Champagne, with the same grapes, in an area that isn't that different in climate. And most people I serve it to wouldn't know the difference (it's actually slightly fruitier).
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.
Continuing the name of that region? Almost no one disputes that the former Yugoslavian republic includes part of the historical region of Macedonia. It is simply a mere portion of that region, with the rest lying in Greece. What really started the beef between that region and Greece is the FYROM's appropriation of Alexander the Great and the traditional Macedonian sun symbol. Greeks say, "Hey, you're a bunch of Slavs. Slavs came in the 6th century AD, and this old stuff is all Ancient Greek, our heritage!". Inhabitants of the FYROM could say "Slavs came and imposed their language, but many of us are genetically descended from Alexander's people!"
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.
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.
The australians are free to name their wine after the grapes. The grapes used to ferment the Tokay wine are Furmint, Muscat lunel, Zéta and Hárslevel. Of them, Furmint and Hárslevel are authochtone, that means only cultivated in Hungary and in the south of Slovakia.
If an australian vineyard is cultivating e.g. Furmint grapes and fermenting them into wine, they are free to call them Furmint, and even Furmint szamorodni (meaning "Furmint as it grows itself", made from both dry and non dry berries). But for what reason they should call it "Tokay"? There is nothing in it that justifies the name. A Tokay wine is not called "Tokay" itself, it is called "Tokay Furmint szamorodni" for instance or "Tokay Eszencia", if they are made from dry berries only.
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.".
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.
In reality you could just label everything "Plonk", have the grapes/location/year(s) in small text for those interested, and people would still buy it.
No, people who know Usenet would avoid it because they'd think it's so bad it got put into a killfile.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
It was a really stupid idea in the first place. A lot of it makes some degree of sense in that it somewhat simplifies the necessary study to know what you're buying, but it's going way out of control. Probably the best example is with champagne, where Champagne, Switzerland is no longer allowed to use it's own name like it had previously to call it's sparkling wine. The village history of doing so dates back to the 17th century and the name of the village back to the 9th.
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
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.
This is not a nationalistic/rationalistic thing. Have you tried to take Furmint grapes and plant them say, in Norway? [For the less knowledgeable, it is too far North for this plant]
I am being extreme but illustrating the main point: a wine is not only the grapes: it is the weather and the soil (and many other factors, actually). This is why most wine is also known by the year: "good" or "bad" years mostly influenced by that years's climate on a specific place.
Australia has lots of wine variety. It can stand on its own merits. There is no need to hijack names for other places, that actually mean (and taste) different.
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.
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.
I'm sure they can, because EU laws don't apply to the French.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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.
I beg your pardon?
The primary three varietals used are Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, and Pinot Meunier. These are all three used in lots of other wines.
Yes, there are six minor varietals which are allowed to be used according to INAO rules, but these are not used enough to deserve the 'often' qualifier in your statement.
Mart
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
Sorry, but you really don't understand this. This has nothing to do with the French despite the number of wines and products from France involved.
Did you notice the mention of Port and Tokay? Those are Portuguese and Hungarian products. They're every bit as interested in protecting their unique products and names.
However the central issue here is trade within the European Union. The external markets are really just secondary to the internal trade within the EU.
The EU is working hard to create a level playing field between the different EU nations [and companies within the region]. To ordinary consumers and citizens this might seem strange sometimes, however I can assure you that the reasoning is very sane.
You might not care about where they come from, but as producers and consumers we certainly do care. What you call "common names" is in reality not that, a Port has it's origins in Portugal, you might not understand this but I can assure you many Europeans do.
In many ways it's both a matter of national and regional pride, and a matter of preserving culture and jobs. It's especially interesting in the context of globalization but also within the increasingly unified European Union. In the face of ever increasing competition centuries old names suddenly need to go from merely respected names to actual legal trademarks.
This has nothing to do with the freedom to create similar products, but you may not abuse the names in the European market. If you wish to sell your [for example Australian] product in Europe you must respect our laws on the matter.
And in case you don't know this these laws have had a much greater effect in Europe where the competition has already been forced to stop using these names. One example is the huge Danish dairy products corporation, Arla, that had to rename all kinds of cheeses that were suddenly reserved for Greek and Italian regions.
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.
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