Luxembourg: The name “Champagne” can be used to sell beer

Protected names like Champagne can be used in ads for other consumer products in certain situations, the top European court ruled Thursday in a case that pitted Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin against a Belgian brewery, Bloomberg News reported April 19.

LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton's Veuve Clicquot and an association of Champagne and wine makers sued the Belgian brewery De Landtsheer Emmanuel in 2002 for advertising a new beer as "champagnebier" and highlighting its sparkling-wine-like qualities. A five-judge panel at the European Court of Justice said that rules on "comparative advertising must be interpreted in the sense most favorable to it."

The decision by the court in Luxembourg will help clarify the rules governing a practice that is common in the United States and is becoming increasingly popular in the European Union, lawyers said. The bloc's 27 countries apply EU law on comparative advertising in quite different ways, said Jeremy Dickerson, the head of intellectual property at the British law firm Burges Salmon.

"The law isn't clear at all," Dickerson said before the ruling. "Companies in Europe use comparative advertising more and more, so any guidance one can get on that is useful."

EU rules define comparative advertising as any advertising "that explicitly or by implication, identifies a competitor or goods or services offered by a competitor." A Belgian court in 2005 asked the European Court of Justice for guidance on interpreting the regulations.

The court ruled Thursday that comparative advertising between products with and without protected names "is possible in certain cases," laying down some of the conditions that must be met.

Comparative advertising must not take "unfair advantage of the reputation of a trade mark, trade name or other distinguishing marks of a competitor or of the designation of origin of competing products," the court said. This requirement would be "partly compromised" by preventing the comparison of a product with one that has a protected name, it ruled.

The case started out in a Belgian court that partly upheld arguments by the Interprofessional Committee on Champagne Wine and Veuve Clicquot that the ads by De Landtsheer Emmanuel were "misleading."

The brewery appealed, accepting only the court's order to stop using "champagnebier" as Champagne is a protected EU designation of origin that can only be used in relation to sparkling wine made in the French region of the same name.

De Landtsheer used the ads for a beer called Malheur Brut Reserve it introduced in 2001 that it said was brewed in a similar way to sparkling wine. To promote those special qualities, the brewery used words including "Brut Reserve," "The First Brut Beer in the World."

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