Wine Australia wants to censor small Barossa winery from giving consumers an honest opinion

Wine Australia is threatening to have a South Australian winemaker/retailer sent to jail for two years if he continues to use words like these on his website:

'This Tasmanian sparkling wine represents far better value than most champagnes.'

The offending word is champagne even though it is not mentioned on the label. The wine bureaucrats argue that the very mention of the word on a website or in a printed description of a wine is illegal under legislation to ratify an agreement between Australia and the European Union.

By David Farmer

All wineries keep records which allows a check that wineries are doing the right thing and one role of Wine Australia is be the inspector or auditor.

It is unexpected that they also have another role which is to control the use of particular terms and phrases which are grouped under a banner called geographical indicators often shortened to GIs.

The Wine Australia email specifically mentions; Rioja, Champagne, Cote du Rhone (including Rhone), and Cote Rotie, terms I have used in my selling descriptions.

It goes on to mention that usage is also restricted for Australian regions.

For 35 years I have been aware that the French are very protective of the use of wine terms to which they feel they have ownership. This first flared up in the late 1970s when local wineries labelled light red styles as Beaujolais.

At the time the business Farmer Bros. was a big importer of French Beaujolais and of course sold the local 'Beaujolais' wines as well. I watched the buying habits of customers with great interest.

I can report customers never had a doubt as to which Beaujolais was French and which Australian. This observation has edged me closer to the school of marketing which says; all publicity is good publicity.

Another example is that in recent years the French have been aggressive in protecting use of the word Champagne.

As the exports of Australian wines began to grow part of the agreement to gain entry to the European Union was to phase out the usage of common European wine terms on Australian labels. In other words the European are wanting to protect what it believes is its intellectual property.

At some time later this trade legislation has been strengthened to restrict not only the use on labels but how these terms can be used in the media.

The Australian Grape and Wine Authority or AGWA which operates under the name Wine Australia, came into being on Tuesday, July 1, 2014 following the merger of Wine Australia Corporation and the Grape and Wine Research Development Corporation.

My suspicion is that at this time a blanket ban was placed into the legislation controlling the use in advertising, as distinct from wine writing, of the large number of agreed geographical terms or GIs.

Over the next few weeks we took advice from a number of sources and replied as follows.

Wine Australia replied on 16th September.

We took the approach of letting them tell us explicitly what the problem was and it came in this form.

This email interested brother Richard and he sent the following thought to a colleague on the 27th August:

The draconian nature of trade agreements between Australia and other countries is well illustrated by recent actions of the federal government body Wine Australia.

Wine Australia is threatening to have a South Australian winemaker/retailer sent to jail for two years if he continues to use words like these on his website:

'This Tasmanian sparkling wine represents far better value than most champagnes.'

The offending word is champagne even though it is not mentioned on the label. The wine bureaucrats argue that the very mention of the word on a website or in a printed description of a wine is illegal under legislation to ratify an agreement between Australia and the European Union..