Proposed Prosecco ban ‘a nightmare’, feta block ‘bizarre’: SA makers rebuff EU
Creators of premium wine and cheese in South Australia have labelled the European Union’s push to ban the use of terms like ‘prosecco’ and ‘feta’ on products as “distressing”.
Local industry figures and makers of fine food and drink are concerned that the European Union’s proposal to stop producers using certain words on labels could decimate the South Australian cheese and wine space, creating a vacuum for importers to flood the Australian market.
The proposed ban on terms including ‘feta’, ‘parmesan’ and ‘prosecco’ is part of a draft free trade deal between Australia and the EU that Federal Agriculture Minister Murray Watt said he would walk away from if the European member states have their way.
For local producers, such a ban on these terms would be “a nightmare”, and would hammer already hard-hit vino producers that are still reeling from the loss of the Chinese market and weaker-than-usual international exports.
Their position reflects that of outgoing South Australian Wine Industry Association chief executive Brian Smedley who told InDaily in April that his organisation was concerned such a ban could encourage the EU to build even more barriers around the local wine industry.
Cheesemongers feel similarly, with one turophile telling InDaily that the proposed feta ban was “bizarre”.
With regard to the bubbles, however, Artwine co-owner Judy Kelly said the prospect of a ban on the term ‘prosecco’ was “distressing”.
Having established the business in 2008 with husband Glen, the Kellys first produced prosecco in the Adelaide Hills in 2012 and have sipped seven vintages of their iteration since. Though this was just a couple of years after Italy moved to create a geographical area called Prosecco and renamed the prosecco grape variety to ‘Glera’, Judy remains steadfast in calling the sparkling wine ‘Prosecco’.
“We bought the vines as ‘Prosecco’ and we produced it as ‘Prosecco’ because the vines were called ‘Prosecco’,” said Jane, whose Artwine specialises in “new and emerging Mediterranean varieties”.
“Prosecco was a variety that we could see was going to be super popular, and we finally had the right vineyard.
“We just think – because we are all about these new varieties – if they cave into Prosecco then they’re going to come after us for Fiano, Montepulciano, Sangiovese and all the others that we actually produce – it’s going to be a nightmare.”
For Judy, the change would see Australian winemakers thrown into turmoil; first the industry would have to pick a new name for the sparkling wine characterised by its sweet, fruity taste, and second, a re-education of the market would be required.
“Australians accept Prosecco, they know Prosecco, lots of us have been overseas and had Prosecco,” Judy said.
“We’ve taken on lots of varieties – Graciano, Sangiovese and Fiano – that we’ve had to educate people about too. So, I suppose we’ve already had to go down that path. To then rebrand a wine is going to be a tough gig.
“I think what we get as imports here are not the high-end Proseccos. What we produce here, very passionately, are very, very good, high-quality Proseccos.”
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For recent 40 under 40 alumnus and founder of Vinify, Christian Canala, the motive behind the EU’s proposal is “pretty transparent”.
“They found this obscure little town that had nothing to do with the wine on the outskirts of Friuli on the Slovenian border. They shoved some Prosecco vines in the ground there and decided ‘that’s how we’re going to appellate it’,” Canala told InDaily.
“It was pretty clear what they were trying to do from that point on.”
Vinify is a wine distributer, and Canala said Proseccos are the company’s top-selling wine, and that Australia’s are not just better than the competition, but cheaper too.
“We shifted away from importing entry-level Prosecco because we couldn’t find an appropriate value ratio, so we’re just selling local Prosecco,” he said.
“We’re selling more of it and better quality for less price than what we would with cheap imported stuff.”
The distributor also highlighted Australia’s proud history as a Prosecco producer, citing the likes of Pizzini Wines and Dal Zotto – both winemakers in Victoria’s King Valley region – as trailblazers who’ve been pioneers of the variety for decades now.
“I would say that if Australia had started plating the grape after [2009] then I’d say okay, it’s appropriate if they’re fighting it and trying to ban the use of the name,” Canala said.
“But the King Valley already had so many Prosecco vines in the ground based off the foresight of the Pizzini’s and the Dal Zotto’s and those families that then to have the name switched on them is pretty ludicrous.”
Potential ‘feta’, ‘parmesan’ ban reeks
Banning Australian cheesemakers from using the words feta and parmesan would slam the local industry according to purveyor Kris Lloyd, who said the proposal ignores the decades that immigrant makers have put into the industry.
Kris Lloyd is a self-taught cheesemaker and has been making dairy product in the Adelaide Hills for 29 years. Her brands include an eponymous label as well as Woodside Cheese Wrights. The founder even boasts that King Charles has eaten one of her varieties of cheese on two occasions.
She labelled the push to ban feta as “bizarre”.
“I’m a self-taught cheesemaker, and I say that they’re Australian cheeses that are made by a Greek and I use Australian milk. I’m going to use a word to describe the cheese that I make and that word is simply a word in the dictionary,” she said.
“I don’t understand the feta [proposal], that one really puzzles me. When you talk about parmesan, there is that kind of connection between the Parma region and Reggio Emilia, but there’s no region called Parmesan.
“We’re such a multicultural country, we have so many immigrants who have arrived and I just feel like Australia has been flying the Italian and Greek cheese flags for decades. Now all of a sudden to strip it away, particularly when there is actually no geographical indicator with these two particular cheeses… I struggle with it, I’m really struggling with it.”
Though her products are popular locally, she also exports cheese to Singapore and the USUnited States and said the ban would really hurt other exporters like herself.
“If we were to jump this massive leap, and if this was to occur, then we really need to understand that it will be a really big deal for us exporting product to the EU,” she said.
“What does that do for us as cheesemakers when imports start flooding in… that could certainly result in a loss of sales for my fellow cheesemakers and myself.
“The terms are household names. Do we all of a sudden say we can’t use spaghetti or pizza?! Where does it stop?”
An opportunity for Australian wine?
Though the Federal Government is pushing against the proposed reforms, there remains a chance that the bans on certain terms could come into effect.
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This would mean producers would have to come up with a new name for Prosecco. Naturally, re-education of the wine-buying public would be necessary as a result, but it could also be an opportunity for local winemakers to create an entirely new, Australian, category.
Speaking to InDaily, wine bar LOC founder Olivia Moore said that winemakers could lean into their unique take on Prosecco and create their own brand: Australian Sparkling.
“I think Australia’s not bad at making sparkling wine, we have beautiful growing conditions to grow grapes that go into great sparkling wine, but maybe Australia hasn’t found its category to own,” she said.
“I think that there’s room to have Australian sparkling wine as its own category. I don’t see why it needs to be Prosecco.
“I think that ‘sparkling wine’ does not sound any worse in any way to me. I love the idea of ‘Adelaide Hills sparkling wine’.”
The wine slinger added that customers were not hugely educated on different wine varieties anyway, and often require on-site guidance to help them understand the differences in types and price points.
“We don’t have heaps of sparkling wine at any point, we change things regularly, but I’ll get someone asking for champagne and I’ll bring them a $250 bottle and they do not mean that – they actually meant a fizzy wine. That’s a huge price difference,” she said.
“Even when I show them the $250 bottle there’s sort of no understanding of why that might be, why it’s even imported from France.
“I don’t know if Wine Australia, as the big umbrella, could potentially assist in some kind of educational clarification for the general consumer which is huge and everyone.”
Establishing ‘Australian Sparkling’ as its own category has huge potential according to Moore, and overcomplicating wine buying with niche names was “wildly unnecessary”.
“The potential is high and the quality is already here. But I’m not a winemaker and I don’t have the task of trying to position my wines. I just think that in terms of the general consumer it’s all confused and misunderstood anyway so why are we trying to make it more complicated?” she said.
“If anything, we just say its Australian Sparkling then it is Australian Sparkling and within that it can be anything.
“I just think overcomplicating it further is wildly unnecessary because we haven’t figured out what we’ve got.”
Vinify’s Canala agreed that the opportunity was ripe for the picking, but said for a wine as iconic as Prosecco that simply re-branding the drink was “idealistic”.
“I think if there’s one industry in the world that could potentially do that then it’s Australia because we don’t have this baggage of excessive history,” the Vinify founder said.
“However, I do think that’s pretty idealistic and easy to say if you don’t have many decades of investment in a grape variety.
“The consumer probably identifies with Pizzini first and Prosecco second because they were already household brand names and they were sort of able to drag the name of Prosecco along with their brand.”
Canala floated the alternative name of “Ausecco”, but said any name change could alienate consumers.
“What do you label it as and how does the consumer identify with that product anymore? Unless you’ve got a really strong brand that is identifiable by its packaging or something like that,” he said.
“Prosecco is supposed to be fun, cheerful, easy drinking. It’s not a terroir-driven wine.
“The majority of what people think as Proseccos is easy drinking because we can easily produce those wines in Australia, so if we’re saying that Australia can’t produce Prosecco anymore, the thirst for Prosecco doesn’t go away.”
On the cheese front, Lloyd also said a re-education process for consumers would have to be undertaken.
“There’s all the cost ramifications of us needing to re-label, and there’s a huge bit of work that would need to be done to re-educate people to help them understand that it’s not called feta,” Lloyd said.
“I thought perhaps it would be called ‘salad cheese’. It’s very limiting. But then they’ll probably want to put some geographical indicators around the word salad!”
“The thing that gets me though is that I’m Greek, I know what feta means and it means a slab or slice. There’s nowhere in Greece for instance called feta, I can’t fly to feta. It’s a word that describes a style of cheese.”
