Place in the Sun
What happens when you give a name the force of law?
If you open the syllabus for the Wine and Spirits Education Trust (WSET)’s Level 3 in Wine class to page 10, you will find a table entitled “Range 1: The Principal Still Wine Producing Regions of the World.” This table extends over three pages and contains about 250 entries. If you start counting from the top, you’re at about 100 before you leave the borders of France. This is by no means an exhaustive list. If you zoom out, there are dozens, even hundreds, of wine areas not included here, including entire countries like Georgia. If, instead, you decide to zoom in, each of these areas has even more subclassifications within them, let alone distinctions between different producers even within the smallest definable parameters. This list alone represents many thousands of years of collective winemaking history and who-knows-how-many liters of wine. It’s expansive enough to justify entire bodies of education dedicated to understanding it (such as WSET Level 3).
I think Americans, by and large, find this degree of subdivision kind of funny. If you’ve been on the internet for enough time over the last five years, you’ve surely come across some version or other of a meme playing on the statement “Champagne has to come from the Champagne region of France, otherwise it’s just sparkling wine.” At the time of writing, the top rated post of all time on the subreddit r/wine is one of these. The trade body in charge of Champagne and European officials certainly aren’t helping matters, if they care at all to change that perception.
But these sorts of laws, usually called Geographical Indication (GI) or Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) laws, have a huge impact on the things we eat and drink. And they are significantly more complicated a topic than you might think. GI laws serve a lot of different purposes: they’re a form of trade protectionism, quality control, cultural memory, consumer information, and quasi-cartelization, to name just a handful. They can be incredibly useful, restrictive and harmful, or sometimes both at once; appreciating that the question is hard is perhaps the most important thing we can think about it.
Let me tell you two quick stories from the world of higher proof. One is related to rum, the other to agave spirits.
Story 1: Some of my favorite rum, when I’m not looking for a walloping from the volatile compounds in my favorite Jamaican rums, is from the nearby Caribbean island of Barbados. Barbados has four main rum producing distilleries: Mount Gay (which is owned by Remy-Cointreau and makes its namesake rum), Foursquare (which makes its namesake rum along with R.L. Seale and Probitas, among other brands), St. Nicholas Abbey (which is very rarely if ever available in the United States), and the West Indian Rum Distillers, or WIRD (which is owned by Maison Ferrand, and makes Planteray’s rum from the island, as well as Malibu coconut rum.) Barbados, despite past efforts, does not have a GI for its rum, largely because of the objections of WIRD. Two provisions are sticking points: that “Barbados Rum” (1) must be fully matured in Barbados and (2) cannot include any “adulterating substances,” which includes sugar.
WIRD’s production processes for Planteray specifically fall afoul of both provisions. First, Maison Ferrand brings some of its rum back to France for maturation before bottling, which affects how evaporation in wood works; second, Ferrand practices “dosage,” a relatively common procedure in Champagne production wherein a sugar syrup called the “liqueur d’expedition” is added to finished product to increase sweetness, add body, and round out unwanted vintage variations, with its rums. As such, WIRD objects to the proposed GI, and the government refuses to pass regulation without universal consent from all four producers.
The proposed GI, which was proposed primarily by a trade body made up of the three non-WIRD producers, does clearly disadvantage WIRD to the benefit of the other three producers. There may be something to the style of rum that WIRD produces under the Planteray brand; cool-climate maturation has a long lineage (it’s part of what differentiates Scotch whisky from Kentucky Bourbon), as does dosage. But the idea that a product bearing the name of the country should be fully produced in that country makes intuitive sense to me and lines up with many other GI laws across the world.
Story 2: In Mexico, there have been regulations governing the production of tequila since 1974.[1] Even by Europe’s standards tequila is heavily regulated: the Consejo Regulador del Tequila (CRT) sends officials to observe and monitor every stage of tequila production, every single day, at every single distillery where it’s made. The GI law is what requires that tequila be made from a minimum of 51% blue Weber agave, for example, as well as providing for the enforceability of “100% agave” declarations on labels where that claim is accurate (as opposed to lower quality “mixto” style tequila.)
But those regulations, and especially its expensive certification and monitoring requirements, exclude smaller producers—sometimes to the benefit of larger actors. The tequila GI has also served as a model for similar legislation applied to other agave spirits, including mescal and more recently raicilla, where significantly more production variation has existed historically and to this day a huge proportion of that production is done by families at their homes on small palenques.
And so in Mexico a new unregulated category has popped up among more artisanal producers: destilados de agave, or “agave distillates,” which do not need to conform to the regulations needed for tequila or mescal. Rejecting the GI terms allows producers to make product in any way they like—which can be used to make high-quality, premium products without the limits or expense of following regulation, as well as to make low-quality, adulterated products. Moreover, while the agave GIs can and have harmed small farmers and producers, the mere existence of a law—even when imperfect—gives a weapon to those producers to rein in expansionism, as this 2009 study from Sarah Bowen et al. in the Journal of Rural Studies shows.
Both of these stories are wildly more complicated than my short (maybe even reductive) intros here might suggest. But I think that’s kind of the point. These questions are hard. There are tradeoffs. We ought to be more mindful of them.
[1] A lot of my understanding here is drawn from Ivy Mix’s Spirits of Latin America, pages 54 to 69.