Champagnisation

Regularly I am overwhelmed with wry smiles and small or big shrug's of shoulders when friends tell me, how they are very aware, that the cava or crémant they drank last saturday as the appetizer before a three course menu in good company of course was not real champagne.

That you are not allowed to call sparkling wines from other regions than Champagne for champagne is known by just about everybody who drinks wine.

YSL and champagnebrus
And maybe it is not too dramatic that Yves Saint Laurent was not allowed to call his latest perfume for Champagne as it happened some years ago. But when 100 old soft drinks can not keep their own name of Champagnebrus, it makes some people smile. At least a in some areas rather anarchistic people as the Danes.

And the latest work of the CIVC - the organisation that amongst many other things also defends the word champagne all over the world - will probably not make it easier to remain serious.

Even I suppose, in this game you choose either not to move or to shoot on whoever, whatever that moves. In the champagneworld branding is just about everything, and the fierce defense is part of it.

The colour champagne
Lately the lawers now have problems with a certain colour, named champagne by the trendpeople, that make up the names of the latest fashions and their colours. Now, this notion is not completely new anymore, but it is rather new, that it oocurs - now for the second time - in a dictionary from Hachette, one of the big publisher's in France (2005 and 2007-edition).

As if the fashion world is not already a big mouthful, Hachette in the two editions also defines the word "champagniser" as the proces, where you add sugar and yeast to a clear wine to let it fermentate a second time in the bottle.

A simple and good definition of the methode champenoise... However, it is a notion that you are not allowed to use on sparkling wines that originates from other places than Champagne. Which is also why the CIVC does not like to see the word "champagniser" used to designate the proces of creating just any sparkling wine like the definition in the dictionary.

Champagnisation
I suggest to introduce the word "champagnisation".

Definition: A at times rather rigorous defense for an originally geographical name, that later has come to designate products from the area of the same name, typically a product of high quality.

How would the lawyers of the CIVC react to that, I wonder?

På dansk

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