Joe Ray

Agence France Presse

PARIS (AFP) - Champagne may be one of the staples of seasonal and other celebrations, adding a fizz to Christmas, New Year or a wedding, but in the sparkling wine’s homeland east of Paris a group of watchdogs is fighting to ensure exclusive use of the term.

A bottle of champagne called ‘Royal Bain de Champagne’ made by Caron perfumes in Paris. The Inter-professional Champagne Committee appointed ‘Champagne detectives’ to verify the authenticity of the name-controlled product and to destroy counterfeit items.(AFP/HO-CIVC)

It is one of the traditions they like the least—the misuse of the word “champagne” on everything from other people’s wine to products as diverse as yoghurt and bubble bath that have nothing to do with the region.

Tracking these perceived insults down and putting an end to them is the job of Nicolas Ozanam, known in France as the “champagne detective.”

The stakes are impressive: in 2003, the Champagne region, the only French wine-producing area not to be in trouble, produced some 293 million bottles of bubbly, and is expected to sell more than 300 million this year.

Forty percent of sales go abroad, making champagne a key factor in national sales figures, with Britain topping the list of customers, followed by the United States, which bought 18.9 million bottles in 2003 and 14.8 million in the first nine months of 2004.

Ozanam is the secretary general of the Comite Interprofessionel du Vin de Champagne (CIVC), the 19,000-member trade association of producers and merchants, where he specializes in international legal issues.

With a team of lawyers and researchers, he works to stamp out what champagne producers see as the hijacking of the prestige of the wine’s name, and the negative effect it has on their integrity.

It can be a long and difficult job, but “most times, the dispute can be treated outside of court,” he says. Through September 2004 alone, Ozanam and the CIVC have worked through more than 140 cases of misuse in France and 30 abroad.

The CIVC’s thinking is that producers in champagne continually build their brand and product quality, while rivals abroad, as well as a host of manufacturers of other goods, hijack the term and by unwanted association, end up making it look worse.

Ozanam and the CIVC have bags full of “champagne” products labelled “champagne” they have collected (and stopped) along the way, from non-French sparkling wine to soap, skin care products, yoghurt and soft drinks.

Among others this year, Ozanam has helped stop a bubble bath made by Caron perfumes in Paris and even a sandpaper disc maker from using “champagne” in their products name.

Champagne’s makers have the awful example of French Chablis white wine to the south of them, which in most parts of the world is considered a high-quality wine from France with a strong selling price made by French producers.

In the United States, however, poor quality locally-made “Chablis” is stocked in cardboard boxes on the bottom shelves of supermarkets, and the genuine product has suffered accordingly.

The CIVC has tough French and European Union (news - web sites) legislation on his side—from this year for example European customs officers can verify the authenticity of name-controlled products and destroy counterfeit items.

Ozanam cites bottles destroyed in Germany after leaving Switzerland and a Dutch-bound Argentinian “champagne” shipment that was stopped and destroyed in Belgium.

Successes in European courts include the outlawing of a Swedish yoghurt, whose ads showed people at glamorous parties holding yoghurt tubs instead of champagne flutes. It was held to be misleading and “improperly used another business owners activities, products, trademarks or similar characteristics.”

French courts also found that Yves St. Laurents Champagne perfume created “an attractive effect borrowed from the prestigious appellation Champagne”—YSL lost both a trademark and the right to sell the product and now calls it something else.

The United States, while one of the CIVC’s biggest markets, is also the source of its greatest frustration, producing two to three times as much ‘champagne’ as it imports. After the 1995 signing of a World Trade Organisation accord on intellectual property eights, Washington theoretically barred any new producers from appearing, but this still remains fuzzy for champagne and other wines such as chianti and port.

A handful of US companies have their government’s authorization to continue a traditional usage of the champagne name on their sparkling wines.

Though the number of such firms is small their output is huge. Constellation Brands, for example, calls itself the “largest producer and marketer of wine” in the world.

“They keep getting bigger,” says Ozanam, who laments the large number of bottles his rivals, which also include Korbel and Gallo, produce and the dollars they make thanks to the word ‘champagne’ on their labels.

At a European-hosted forum in Washington in October, 2002, some US trade officials questioned whether champagne the bubbly actually got its name from Champagne the region.

“They even suggested that champagnes economic value could be due to the work of California growers. This was worse than Stalinist Russia!” half-jokes an exasperated CIVC official.

Without overwhelming help from the US government—which uses the term indiscriminately in official documents—reform has to come from the wine industry itself, but this year, Ozanam says, it has been “on standby.”

“The United States has also put into place a new law on how it imports wine that goes into effect on January 1, 2005,” says Ozanam. “It’s difficult to know what’s going to happen, but it’s going to make a lot of paperwork.”

He hails a few positive trends across the Atlantic, such as the Napa Valley Vintners Association fight to keep “Napa Ridge” wines made with grapes from elsewhere from reaching the shelves, which could help champagne.

“In California, people are starting to decide to put their brand names forward” instead of using champagne, he says.

A website provided by the Wine Market Council (http://www.wineanswers.com), which represents US wine producers, insists that “only a sparkling wine made in the Champagne region of France can be called Champagne, even if it is made from the same type of grape as Champagne using the same production techniques.”

“Sparkling wines made in the US by the same method of production ... are sometimes labeled as methode Champenoise wines.” it says.