Big Brother Champagne

The small village Champagne in Switzerland has been the subject of posts previously in the Brief when they attracted the attention of the Champagne region and CIVC in France. French Champagne did not like that the Swiss village used the same name, believing that it could confuse consumers, and made a deal with the Swiss government that force the Swiss wine producers to stop using their village name on the bottles. (Instead they tried selling their wine under the names Libre-Champ and C-ampagne, albeit clever but with not much success.) Champagne (the French version) has also stopped a maker of biscuits in the Swiss village to stop using the name and to refer to the biscuits as made from a traditional recipe from Champagne. Recently the locals of the village staged a protest where a forklift symbolically draped in a French flag uprooted the sign with the village name at the edge of the village. Watch the "dramatic" video on YouTube. (And watch more wine videos on BKWine TV)

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