Cease and desist for video on how to make “Grana Padano Style Cheese” [video]

> The mind share for that word went down. Instead we found ourselves hearing people asking for Prosecco or bubbly. Champagne might now be able to assert that only the'quality' product from their region has the name, but I suspect it's just caused the companies that produce wine to make sure that they own the trademark, and push their brand, not the term champagne. Regardless of whether it's from that region.

I haven't noticed a substantial change. Most people in the US I meet that aren't really into wine still use "champagne" to refer to sparkling wine. I was actually looking at making mimosas the other day and picked out a bottle of okay sparkling wine (it seems silly to mix expensive wine with OJ to me), and my SO commented that mimosas she thought mimosas had to use champagne. I picked her brain about it (I was shocked someone would pay for champagne for a normal Saturday mimosa), and she thought champagne was a totally distinct thing from sparkling wine. She thought sparkling wine was force carbonated like beer, or maybe just flat wine mixed with seltzer water like a wine spritzer. She didn't know what prosecco was, and when I told her, she said she would call that champagne.

I don't think their campaign has had much of an effect on the average American. It makes a difference to connoisseurs, but the average American doesn't know the technical difference (and likely has never had true champagne, because of the relatively high price).

I find that's generally true of culinary things in America, though. Many of my friends buy their wine from gas stations and are happy with it, which I struggle with. They typically only stock bottom of the barrel stuff like Barefoot; the white wines taste more like apple juice with vodka mixed in it than a real wine. The reds are generally exceptionally sweet; even full bodied reds lack the flavor and feel of tannins (probably to increase the appeal among people that hear cabernet sauvignon is a good wine, but don't know they don't like full bodied wines).

It's really a shame. There are some quite good wines in the cheap range (especially if you go for less traditional regions, like South Africa), but gas stations don't carry them and people tend to judge the region for unfair reasons. I get shocked looks if I open a bottle from Argentina or South Africa, as if wine is only meant for the wealthy and the grape vines can sense if they're in an economically disadvantaged country and will refuse to produce good grapes until you transplant them to a country with a higher GDP per capita.

That book is also on Kobo, for those of us who don't want to give more money to Amazon:

https://www.kobo.com/ca/en/ebook/real-food-fake-food

> I guess the reason why the Italian consortium sent this (otherwise stupid) cease-and-desist to this poor Australian guy, is because they're desperately trying to defend the real stuff from the fakes.

It's not "otherwise stupid" it _is_ stupid. They should be going after the counterfeiters not someone who is both trying to educate people on making as authentic a cheese as possible while simultaneously making very clear that his cheese is not a true grana padano. Personally after seeing the consortium act like this, I consider all their other actions suspect. In my mind, this weakens their legitimacy as an organization. I'm sure I'm not the only person with this reaction.

> I sympathize with the guy, but it's a global battle; and organizations that are supposed to defend the consumer are doing next to nothing (expecially in the US). This is not about protecting a "brand"; it's about the fact that when you buy grana padano in the US and it's made of sh*t, you as a consumer should be able to tell.

That has _nothing_ to do with this youtuber.

>Prosecco is also not Champagne

Indeed: Prosecco is a spumante.

The American government insists that patents, trademarks, and copyrights are respected worldwide without jurisdiction because they got everyone else in the room to agree to do that in exchange for import market access. That's why the WTO TRIPS agreement exists. Everyone agreed to the same laws, and agreed to allow foreigners to sue domestic businesses, so it doesn't matter who has jurisdiction over what. America doesn't buy your cheese unless you agree to protect their movies. The only outliers are countries which have already pissed off America so much that market access without regime change is off the table. So, if you see someone say, for example, "but DMCA doesn't apply in my country", they're either wrong, or you should start looking up the export regulations involved with knowingly talking to Iranians before you wind up in federal prison.

This isn't even exclusively an American problem. The EU and Japan do it too, and more countries will start doing that as they start getting stronger domestic creative industries. The more money a country makes from owning copyrighted works, the more protection they will demand from other countries. Hell, the last major copyright term extension (the "Sonny Bono" one in the US) was started by the EU doing the same thing to America. The EU passed a term extension that had a reciprocality requirement: if America didn't agree to the term extension, then American works would enter the public domain in the EU quicker than EU-origin works did. This is a fiendishly clever way to ratchet in term extensions, and it works because the WTO treaties only specify maximums for copyright exceptions, not protection. You're always allowed to go stricter.