Friday, March 29, 2024

Wine talks turn sour

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Wine producers are the latest primary industry group to throw European Union demands over so-called Geographic Indications back in the faces of their trade negotiators. In trade talks with New Zealand the EU wants recognition and protection for 1760 wine names associated with European place names.
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The system of Geographic Indications (GIs) being proposed would restrict the use of those names in the NZ market for everybody but European producers.

In an unusual move the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade earlier this year, some eight months after negotiations started, asked for NZ producer groups to notify it of any objections to the EU proposals.

NZ Winegrowers has identified 339 of the wine names put forward by negotiators from the European Commission for which there is a potential problem.

The wine body’s objections follow those of the dairy industry, which opposed 29 of the 59 dairy products (56 cheese names and one cream and two types of butter) the EU claims as GIs in the trade talks.

It also comes just weeks after EU Agriculture Commissioner Phil Hogan’s visit here, during which he encouraged the NZ dairy industry to follow the wine industry’s lead and embrace the use of GIs.

NZ Winegrowers advocacy general manager and general counsel Jeffrey Clarke said the industry backs GIs where they give legal protections to wines and spirits linked to specific regions such as Central Otago pinot noir or Marlborough sauvignon blanc.

However, the list submitted by the EU had potentially gone beyond that by claiming exclusive use of varieties of grapes.

“Some of them, for example, have a region name and a grape name and what we do not want is for them to protect the grape name so we cannot use the grape name.”

Clarke said the EU list also includes common terms used in compound wine names.

“Some of them include really common names like hill or village and obviously we do not want a situation where the fact that the GI contains the word hill means the word hill can’t be used.

“If all that is being protected is the geographical name of the French place or the Italian place or whatever it is then that is fine and nobody is going to have a problem with that but it is not clear from the list what is going to be protected.

“You would like to hope that we would reach a sensible solution on that but the fact that they have submitted the entire list without having agreed in advance on the scope of the protections to be granted just means that we have to raise these as problems because if we don’t then we might accidentally concede them.”

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