19 August 2021 News

Marušić B., The concept of terroir tested: sharing of the same terroir between two EU Member States, Journal of Intellectual Property Law & Practice, Volume 16, Issue 4-5, April-May 2021, Pages 435–441

This article looks into wine as a credence product, whose bond of trust is vested in the concept of terroir as a signal to the consumer that the wine she or he is buying originates from a specific location and is made in specific circumstances. The main question of the present analysis is what the legal consequences are when such terroir is shared between two EU Member States, looking into the examples of wines Tokaj and Teran. Arguments advanced in the article are that, on the EU-wide level, there are two effects of the shared terroir. The first effect is a shared PDO, and the second effect is an artificial enlargement of terroir that is not linked to the original geographical position.