Slashdot Mirror
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...
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.
hahah, welcometo'straya, ya dickhead!
ffs, honestly. We're a country founded on (probably your) criminals, and we have a habit of making words our own. It's a crim thing. Try it one day. It's no big deal really. We're not changing for you faeries up North, except maybe if we wanna make some money out of ya'.
Having said that, time to pass the grammar buck and have a whinge of me own; Can you please tell citizens of the USA English by default is not from the US, it from England. Funny that. When I download software with English, I expect it to default to use words like 'centre', 'colour', 'armour', 'aluminium' et al. Fix it arsehats, or I'll find another Slashdot article to bemoan my muelings until my beer runs out and then I'll whine about that, to. Hell, even my browser and linux install are set to UK English and are still telling me I just misspeeled all that.
And soccer is a valid word. English made it same time as football. Probably because they, like us, have other kinds of footy. So shut up Euro-trash.
P.S. I bet you're a Pom. And yeah me grammar sucks wewt!
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.
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.
P.S. I bet you're a Pom.
Wrong guess. It was my ancestors that first spotted and mapped Australia, but saw that it was such a godforsaken place that they happily left it for the Brits.
karma police: arrest this man, he talks in maths; he buzzes like a fridge, he's like a detuned radio. [radiohead]
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.
kepsev? - It's "cabsav". /Bloody tourists.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
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.".
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
Funny that. When I download software with English, I expect it to default to use words like 'centre', 'colour', 'armour', 'aluminium' et al.
Humphrey Davy, the Englishman who discovered it, named it aluminum. It's not our fault the Brits screwed up the spelling on that one later on.
rage, rage against the dying of the light
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.
You can have those things when your country gets together as a whole and apologizes to the USA for Yahoo Serious and Paul Hogan! I mean, we save your asses from the Japs in WWII, you give us one of the most iconic car movies of all time with "Mad Max" so we think you're friends and then for NO REASON WHATSOEVER you release that nightmare plague of unfunny upon us. What did we ever do to you? Hell it was bad enough when you gave us Olivia Newton-John, but we were willing to let that slide because she was cute, but Young Einstein? Or Crocodile Dundee II? That should have been declared an act of war!
So you Aussies get together and say you're sorry, and go back to Imperial Units like God and the Queen intended, and then we'll talk. Its bad enough we have to deal with those pasty Brits getting infected by the metric system by cheese eating surrender monkeys,but at least they try to make up for that by giving us shows like AbFab and The Vicar of Dibly. But releasing Yahoo Serious and Paul Hogan from whatever hellhole you kept them in upon us poor unsuspecting Americans? That was....that was just wrong, and you KNOW it!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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.
Created MTV.