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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...
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.
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.
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.
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