Russia rules only its bubbly can be ‘champagne’ in spat with French
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Maybe if this sort of retaliation becomes more common we won't have as much crap about not being able to make "grana padano style cheese"
"Champagne" or "Bordeaux" (for example) name places. It's "wine of Champagne", "wine of Bordeaux", etc. like when saying "Balsamic vinegar of Modena". It does not name a recipe itself.
I think countries that have this sort of local traditions and products, and care about their cooking and drinks understand the value of these protections rather than allowing a race to the bottom. If you can have for instance bottles labelled "Bordeaux" with "Made in where-ever" in small characters then basically it's bland uniformization and meaningless buzzwords for the sake of mass production.
It's no more than local protectionism that has no bearing on the type or quality of the products. If you want to place a "manufactured in X region" feel free, im certainly in favor of honest and consumer awareness.
But stating that certain things can only be made in X place, regardless of the fact that there is no distinguishible difference in the final product is simply put crap.
This is not protecting consumers from mistakenly purchasing things, it is simply putting up a fence around the existence of certain products for no reason other than to satisfy locally politically connected groups, at the expense of everyone else and especially consumers.
That's not the way it works, as explained in my previous comment.
You can make and sell wine that is similar to, even indistinguishable from, "wine of Champagne". Just don't imply that it's from there by calling it "Champagne" when it's not. That's the point.
This is not like "whisky" for example, that is just a type of alcoholic beverage. On the other hand, "Scotch whisky" means it's made in Scotland, like "Champagne" means it's made in Champagne. Usually these also come with regulations as to the ingredients and production methods to make the product even more defined.
Consumers don't lose, on the contrary. They have access to a vast array of products, even very similar ones. This makes sure that what's on the tin matches the expectation of what should be in the tin.
Except it actually is how it works, because if making sure that the consumer is aware of the local origin is the one thing its supposed to do, you wouldn't have the production process being part of whats being protected as well, and you'd be able to sell any random soft goat cheese as Parmesan just because it was made in that reason. After all, they're not lying about where its coming from, now are they?
The fact of the matter is that the exact location of the manufacturer is pretty much irrelevant for the average consumer, and the names of the wines, cheeses, etc... being protected are treated by most consumers as simply the name of the product itself, disconnected from its production location beyond a "it was originally invented here".
If you ask the average person on the street outside of italy where "Grana Padano" cheese is made, you'd have some people say "oh its from somewhere in italy", but almost no one would be able to tell you the exact region that the protected origin designation is so strongly trying to "protect".
The answer to that is simply that it just doesn't matter and the name is viewed by consumers as primarily a designation of the product being sold, rather than the location it was produced in.
Your arguments are the arguments used by the EU to justify the unjustifiable and to be quite frank i'm done with that crap.
If a product is molecularly indistinguishable from another there is no legitimate reason they can not have the same name. If you are so hung up on ensuring consumers being able to know where it was made, slap a "made in X" label on it.
Anything else is bullshit.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/defense-national-s...