Opener
Vintners and growers from the far western coastal areas of the Sonoma Coast AVA have recently launched a marketing program to promote the “WestSonomaCoast” area. The group has determined, at least for now, that the politics and bureaucracy surrounding the AVA formation process do not best serve the group’s goal of distinguishing the far west […]
In the WTO’s continuing efforts to move forward the 13-year old agenda on a multilateral register for geographical indications for wines and spirits, the WTO reported last week that a small working group representing the divergent positions of the various member countries had completed two additional sections of “emerging text” for the register proposal. “Emerging […]
In what is being touted by the World Trade Organization (WTO) as the first attempt to produce a single draft text for a Multilateral Register for Geographical Indications for Wines and Spirits pursuant to the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), representatives from WTO member countries met this month and put together […]
On January 20, 2011, TTB published the long awaited Final Rule on its controversial Notice No. 78, which proposed substantial changes to the AVA petitioning and formation process. Notice No. 78 was published on November 20, 2007; the same day that the agency published Notice No. 77, proposing to establish the Calistoga AVA. Perhaps the […]
January 1, 2011, was the effective date of California Business & Professions Code Section 25246 which mandates that any wine label carrying the name of an AVA located entirely within Sonoma County must also bear the appellation “Sonoma County” on the label in a font no smaller than two millimeters on packages larger than 187 ml, […]
On December 29, 2010, the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) approved the expansion of the Santa Maria Valley AVA in California’s San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara Counties by approximately 19,000 acres. The expansion comes along the AVA’s current Southern border in Santa Barbara County. Proponents of the AVA indicated that the expansion was […]