Australia Adopts EU's Geographical Indicator System For Wine 302
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."
Re:Australian Tokay makes me sad (Score:1, Informative)
Yes, it's strange. I remember that even Alsacian french wine producers can not use the name "tokay" anymore because of Appellation d'origine contrôlée. That dates back from 2003
Re:Dont't like the idea anyway... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:So long as I can still get goon for $10/5L... (Score:3, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:More EU stupidity. More AU cowtowing. (Score:5, Informative)
I'm not a wine buff, but I've found that Australian, Chilean, South African and Californian wines are generally both better and cheaper than French wines. There are some really great French wines, but 99% of them are overrated.
When it comes to European wine, I prefer Italian anyway.
Re:So long as I can still get goon for $10/5L... (Score:2, Informative)
Both Feta and the proper name of Parmesan enjoy "protected designation of origin" status within the EU already, as well as plenty of other foods such as Parma Ham.
Sure, but it's BS because they were in common use worldwide to describe the kind of product as opposed to the origin, well before the EU became the EU.
Re:Australian Tokay makes me sad (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:More EU stupidity. More AU cowtowing. (Score:5, Informative)
> Some of us haven't ruined their taste buds with bad beers and ketchup sauce, so we do care.
But would you be able to prove that you can detect geographic differences in a double-blind taste test [winetastingguy.com]?
Re:Australian Tokay makes me sad (Score:5, Informative)
Re:More EU stupidity. More AU cowtowing. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Australian Tokay makes me sad (Score:1, Informative)
Actually. North Korea criticizes South Korea because it doesn't use the traditional word for Korea(Joseon) in Korean but Republic of the Big Meaningless Chinese Character(Han).
Re:More EU stupidity. More AU cowtowing. (Score:2, Informative)
No, you are wrong. From the wikipedia article:
Re:kepsev (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:More EU stupidity. More AU cowtowing. (Score:3, Informative)
Now, there is some logic to applying the geographical appellation to ordinary wines, because the soil and the climate potentially have significant effect on the way that the wine comes out (this is certainly true of another geographic appellation, Vidalia onions). However, from everything I have seen I do not believe that where a fortified wine is made has much effect on the flavor of a fortified wine. It seems far more likely that the process has much more effect on the taste/experience of drinking a fortified wine than where that fortified wine is made.
Re:Australian Tokay makes me sad (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Australian Tokay makes me sad (Score:3, Informative)
That's a New World wine thing. In general, New World winemakers are more about technique and the grape, and Old World winemakers are more about tradition and the land (terrior). Old World region labels like "Burgundy" require not only that grapes be grown in a particular area, but that the wine be made from a particular blend of grapes and in a particular way. New World region names are only region names.
Champagne, as an extreme example, is not very much about the grape variety at all. Champagne often uses a lot of grapes that you'd otherwise not make good wine from. The procedure, however, is key to good Champagne. The same is true of Sherry, Port, etc.
Re:Perhaps not as much as you think (Score:3, Informative)
Simply untrue. U.S. wines have been following this convention for a long time now. While imported wine has been on the rise, the average consumer has happily bought Californian crap the whole time. (Thankfully, today's bad Californian wine is much better than that of 30 years ago.) In fact, two of the U.S.'s most popular wines are grape-labeled, not region-labeled.
Anyone who's more discerning than the average consumer hopefully has the presence of mind to either read the signs in the store or go to a wine store and ask someone.
Re:Perhaps not as much as you think (Score:4, Informative)
To be a Certified Sommelier [mastersommeliers.org], you must be able to tell not only vintage and country, but acidity and alcohol levels, all under blind conditions.
Yes, a lot of "wine snobs" aren't as good as they say, but it is entirely possible for people to have taste buds trained to that level.
Re:Marketing would be my guess (Score:5, Informative)
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.