Movie snobs making fun of wine snobs. Funny.

bdub77 They can't use port? What BS.


They can call it Starboard.

Nah, go the other way. I think they should be able to label catfish eggs as "caviar", garden slugs as "escargot", spam with crisco whipped in as, "pate frois gras", and the fungus from your shower stall as "truffles". Let's kickstart this economy and take those snobs down a peg.

/burned down, fell over, and then sank into the swamp...

This would be like making it illegal to sell a "Chicago style" hot dog that had ketchup on it (which I've seen outside of Chicago).

But while I feel that such a farkup is disgusting and worthy of the most heinous of physical violations, I'm not about to say that it's worth passing a stupid ass law for.

The whole "Champagne" thing is no better. It describes a products taste and ingredients...who cares if it's not from the region where it originated??? Big farking deal. One would have to be a tremendous snob to give a rat's ass.

I agree with this. Too many companies these days use fancy words to make their products look better than they really are.

Here's an idea: If a company wants to trademark a product name that uses English words, then those words have to be a true description of the product.

Sans Chateau

And they've been beating the piss out of the French wines in international competitions for some time now. Well, along with the Australians, they have been

Which is actually the interesting part of the deal that is NOT mentioned in the headline. The US will now be allowed to sell wines made with non-traditional techniques in Europe. France has some pretty strict laws as to what you can do to the wines you're making, whereas the US not so much. So some of the ideas that have added flavour and variety to the American/Australian wines will make it to Europe. It's a win for both sides. The Europeans get to keep the value of their brand (which is what "Champange" and the like are really. You wouldn't let some other company go around using the Microsoft (tm) brand either) and the Americans get to start selling a larger variety of wines in Europe.

Welcome to our world government. Because fighting over what words are on a bottle is what is really important. If you ask WW2 vets why they stormed the beach at Normandy, they will tell you without fail that it was so snobby French winemakers could prevent Americans from mislabeling their wine.

Man, it really pisses me off when I see New York strip steak on a menu when no one there has ever seen New York.

Not really, but same concept

The solution is to give American wines some fancy sounding native american name, put Sitting Bull on the label and those ignorant French will fight for the right to dream about buying a bottle.

/Canadian
//Lives in an igloo
///Drives a dog-sled to work
////Works at a fur trader company
/////Some French nationals believed me

listen, the french have little to be proud of. give them this. be magnanimous. give them their wine names and their stupid little hats and their lovely sounding language that is really only a step above the grunting and clicking of mountian chimps.

Quadrupulator

Best American wines? I'm no expert, but I'm a big fan of Napa German-style wines and Oregon Pinots.

Best fairly cheap ($10-15) bottle unless you've ruined yourself with really really expensive wines - Big Fire Pinot Noir from Oregon.

And I agree that big American beers are almost all pisswater. We do some killer micros, though, and I have a soft spot for any beer from Goose Island or Two Brothers.

bdub77:
I think the French just have a bug in their ass because California, Australia and places like Chile and Argentina started using grape type to describe their wine. They still want to call their Cabernet/Merlot mixes 'Bordeaux' even though everyone in the world now pretty much calls them by the percentage of a certain type of grape, ie Cabernet. Fark em.

EXACTLY. They're trying to modify the context of what it means. So, does this mean I can move to that region, throw some vodka in a jug of grape juice, and call it "Bordeaux"? Probably not. But damn, that would be justice.

Wonko Fortytwo: They can call it Starboard.

That would be unbelievably awesome. They'd never do it, of course, but I'd buy some just on principle. Unfortunately wine growers take themselves far too seriously, as a general rule.

There's a place called "Chadsford" near Longwood Garden's outside of Philly that's pretty good. No voting machines OR rivers to cross withing visual range. They are double screwed.

jeebus7

You owe me a keyboard.

SacriliciousBeerSwiller

But is should be illegal to sell a Chicago hot dog with ketchup.

Oh, and whoever at Pizza Hut came up with their "Chicago-style" pizza and those Bostonians who call themselve "Uno's" outside Chicago should all be ground up into sausage.

miscreant: Which is actually the interesting part of the deal that is NOT mentioned in the headline. The US will now be allowed to sell wines made with non-traditional techniques in Europe. France has some pretty strict laws as to what you can do to the wines you're making, whereas the US not so much.

I hope this snowballs into other arenas. I would love to get access to more non-Reinheitgebot beer in Germany. I love Finnish Sahti style beer.

A good American "Chateau" wine from the Sonoma Valley, Chateau St. Jean (pronounced "gene"), named after d00d's wife (or so I've been told).

Very good stuff.

If Europeans started marketing 'Napa' with stars and stripes on the label, I don't think US winemakers would approve. The regional name is not just a word it's a description of the wine. An American wine that uses French geography to describe itself is an american wine that can't stand on it's own or represent it's region. It's an acknowledgement of it's own inferiority.

That Americans use the term "Champagne" to describe their bubbly would be as silly as using the word "Coonawarra" to describe their reds.

strangeguitar: Sounds fair to me. I see a whole slew of wines coming from the swamps of Florida surrounding the Disney Magic Castle.
Goofy Merlot.

Actually, Disney owns that land, too. There isn't a place where you can live off of disney property and still see the castle, that I know of. They own a freakin huge plot of land that they got for dirt cheap in the 60s because it was all swampland...hell, some of it still is.

"Now go away, or I shall taunt you a second time!"

Well according to Wikipedia:

"A French castle is a chateau-fort, for in French a simple chateau connotes a grand country house at the center of an estate."

So presumably that means you should be able to see a grand country house, not a castle. Not quite so difficult to arrange outside of Europe, I suspect. Presumably the vineyard could count as the "estate".

Look, the French approach to protecting wine growers or agricultural products is no less silly than the stateside version where we copyright words or phrases.

A la Mc Donald's or Nike or some other Michael Moore fodder.

I've thought of a snarky way around this. Have a male make the wine in his home. Since a man's house is his castle, boom. instant Chateau wine.

/Chateau 'The Robinsons' ?

"Bring us some fresh wine....No more of this old stuff"
-The Jerk

Nightsweat: "Uno's" outside Chicago should all be ground up into sausage



This is true, because Uno's sucks. Being a pizza lover, and having waited hours to eat at what purported to be the original Uno's in Chicago, I say, without reservation, it was the first time pizza has ever made me stop eating and go get a fast food cheeseburger. It was awful. It was like eating a wet loaf of bread that someone had ground partially cooked sausage onto and layered on cheese from some mutant cow.

I would say it was just an off night, but my hosts from Chicago were raving the entire time about it, and enjoying each revolting morsel. It made me think of "Rapper's Delight" and had me rushing for some quick relief from a bottle of Kaopectate.

It's only a model...

Jean-Puc_Licard: Good, I hate crappy American wines with misleading labels. American wine makers shouldn't be calling their fizzy wine "Champagne" either. Other countries have the class not too.

Too bad the French can't come to terms w/their inferiority complex.

justanotherfarkinfarker:

Well thank goodness Chateau Ste. Michelle
Actually has a Chateau. Not bad for Washington.


Does that building count as a castle?

bdub77-

These are also prohibited:
burgundy, chablis, champagne, chianti, claret, haut-sauterne, hock, madeira, mlaga, marsala, Moselle, port, retsina, Rhine, sauternes, sherry and tokay.


As well they should be. They are all location-specific, and have been used to accurately label wine for hundreds of years. Just because the US has a policy of using ill-informed, overblown and disingenuous marketing doesn't mean we should be allowed to screw up the standards that were invented and implimented by the rest of the wine-making world, over a century before our country even existed.

They can't use port? What BS.

Port comes from Portugal. Burgundy comes from Burgundy. Chablis comes from Chablis. It's not that hard. You don't see the French labelling their wines "Napa Valley" do you?

Most of the people here are misinterperating this rule out of ignorance. It's funny to watch a bunch of computer geeks who will argue incessantly about Mac vs. Windows, or Firefox vs. IE call people who know good wine from piss "snobs". Pot, Kettle, here's your glass house. Have fun.

Nightsweat:
Oh, and whoever at Pizza Hut came up with their "Chicago-style" pizza and those Bostonians who call themselve "Uno's" outside Chicago should all be ground up into sausage.

What IS Chicago-style pizza, anyway? People, including local pizza chains, keep implying it's the big fat stuffed variety. I feel it's really the thin crust, cut into squares variety though. Which, by the way, Pat's Pizzeria has perfected.

Wow, I should have assumed the wine ignorance here on FARK would be bad, but not this bad.

I not even going to attempt to tell you why American wine producers should not use certain terms. Not that you beer drinkers would care ;)

/Wine snob
//Wife is sommelier
///all in good fun :)

Mr Guy

Why eat Uno's deepdish when you could eat Giordano's Stuffed.

Jean-Puc_Licard: That Americans use the term "Champagne" to describe their bubbly would be as silly as using the word "Coonawarra" to describe their reds.



Perhaps, but I think standard American trademark law should apply here. The term champagne has become generalized to a term refering to any sparkling white with sugar added after fermentation. You could grow merlot grapes ( I don't know how well, of course) in the Champagne region of France; would it then be okay to sell that as Champagne merlot? I doubt it, so clearly the processing makes it champagne, and not the region.

jeebus7

SOOOO many things I want to say to you. But all the Yanks will beat me up

Oh those silly Fraunch

ComicBookGuy: Too bad the French can't come to terms w/their inferiority complex.

Oops, let me clean that up: Too bad the French can't come to terms w/their inferiority. The U.S.A., Japan, England, Germany, and the 80 or so other countries superior to France giggle when ppl like you biatch in places like this.

"SacriliciousBeerSwiller [TotalFark]

With all the potential great things the EU could do, they sure spend a lot of time on stupid subjective bullshiat like this..."

Why? You appear to believe that the entire EU staff stopped doing whatever and solely concentrated on this one issue. Most likely whichever body of the EU raised this, raised it due to feedback from the wine producers within the EU. As other people have stated, all it is doing is making sure that wines are properly labelled.

And your government also agreed to this ruling.

However i do agree that the EU does have the potential to do good things.. of which it has lacked (consistantly).

Lady J

don't be afraid...oh wait, your people have a little problem with that, don't they?

Andulamb: Thanks for tumbling on the new French wine coming out this year, poop crmeux de chien.

Looks like the french have to fight back after Lance took his ball and went home. Victorious. Again.

Too much whine this morning. My head hurts.

justanotherfarkinfarker: Well thank goodness Chateau Ste. Michelle actually has a Chateau. Not bad for Washington.

Yeah well, too bad that their reds suck donkey nuts. But I will agree with Bugsi that their Reislings are fairly decent.

fish500: We should also ban anyone who says that "Sideways" was a great movie.

A-fncking-men. After it slammed the Oscars, I was thinking, 'Hey maybe I should make the effort'. The only thing good in that movie was the asian chick beating that guy with the motorcycle helmet. I was in SF about a week ago and went and did the whole 'napa' thing. Found a couple of mail-order only wineries that were actually decent (changed much of my opinion on Cali wines since I prefer Aussie and Spain) and several that reinforced my opinion that most California wineries think enough oak to make a paddle is good somehow. But the thing that annoyed the crap out of me was that ALL the winery tasting employees were absolute jackasses. Very rude, so screw em all.

One funny ancedote, one guy was actually nice and encouraged me to try their merlot despite the movie Sideways. I just laughed and told hime I didn't give a rat's ass about that movie and he was visibally relieved. So its apparently true that stupid movie has influenced opinions of the herd.

Lord_Dubu: Instead of just getting different recommendations this option would instantly dispatch an army of ninja to eliminate the entire cast, crew and production team responsible for the movie in question.

You win. Thread over man.

Do any of you know how awesome Whidbeys Port is?

So fruity jerry

Mr Guy, I've lived in Chicago for several years and I've never set foot in Uno. Not once. It was probably great once, but places tend to go downhill once they know they can sell their product on their name alone. Giordano's is a good chain, but even some of their locations are awful (particularly a couple of the suburban locations). I am partial to Pat's and Leona's.

Isuldirs [TotalFark]

I not even going to attempt to tell you why American wine producers should not use certain terms. Not that you beer drinkers would care ;)

Hush now, I'm enjoying some fine Chateau Le Budweiser.

we have "Chicago town pizza" in the uk, in fine print on the ad it says "made in Ireland"