But is tea distinguished by its terroir (like wine), or is it just a matter of cultivars (like bananas)? I.e. is Sri Lankan "Darjeeling" blind-taste-test-equivalent to Darjeeling from Darjeeling?
I can support a concept of "growing regions" for foods where the growing region matters; but otherwise, it's just bald monopolism.
It's brand, simply. If you produce Coca Cola in a pepsi factory, does it matter ?
The fact is, for many of these products, formal brand recognition did not exist back when the production tradition started. Therefore, when you buy Gouda, or Roquefort, or Bordeaux wine, you buy with the understanding that you're buying the real deal, but there's no brand per se. With the development of mass consumption and international trade, Europe has started protecting these products with protected origin recognition.
On the other hand, the US has much more brand protection on their strong exports, because they emerged much later. And consequently, they have laws very protective of brands, but don't recognize Europe's protected goods. You see it as natural because you were raised in that culture, but for many european people, US food practices would be considered similar to accepting fake iphones, mcD's or Coca-Cola.
Within the framework of international trade agreements, this becomes a source of problems, ofc ; because accepting one side's or the other's definition would mean culling the opposite industry.
Brands and growing regions are both "natural kinds", insofar as they're both things you would expect to evolve from many businesses selling a (complex) commodity from the same region, sometimes competing, sometimes colluding. They both make sense, and can both be used together. But they shouldn't be conflated.
Brands are organizational signifiers. They speak of privately-held organizational knowledge and experience brought-to-bear.
A growing region, meanwhile, is a signifier for natural local factors of the region that defy replication. Anyone operating an organization in that region will reap some of the benefits of that region; even Starbucks coffee beans, if grown in Brazil, would contain some Brazilian terroir.
IP rights protect brands, because brands are inherently rivalrous things that can be bought and protected at the organizational level, like other IP rights. IP rights do not protect growing regions, because growing regions are not inherently rivalrous; anyone can "sneak into" the appropriate region (buying up land previously used for non-growing purposes, etc.) and found a new organization with a claim to the growing region.
But sometimes, "growing regions" are also (secretly) the results of colluding organizations of humans, rather than natural factors. Champagne isn't bubbly because of anything the Champagne area of France does to it. It's a long-standing agreement between the organizations that operate in the region to make it that way.
And that is a brand. But it's a brand that exists on the "wrong level", so to speak; it's a brand held in a sort of commons that any organization is free to enter. Nobody has stewardship over such a brand.
It makes perfect sense for Champagne to be a brand—but it makes no sense for Champagne the growing region to be the brand. It would be much more sensible to have the brand exist at the human level: to call together all the organizations that are currently dubbed "Champagne growers", and tell them that they now own equity stakes in a trust that in turn owns the IP rights to the trademark "champagne."
---
> US food practices would be considered similar to accepting fake iphones, mcD's or Coca-Cola
Ah, but I would accept those things! If, and only if, they were structurally identical to the real ones.
"Ghost shift" products[1] are indistinguishable from the real thing—because they are the real thing. They're produced in the same factories, by the same people, with the same raw inputs. It's just that they're not being produced toward the revenue of the contracted client who submitted the production spec. So they're "knock-offs." But they're structurally identical.
I think most people, if told that they could either buy an iPhone; or buy a "myPhone" that's made of all the same components in the same layout with the same tolerances as a real iPhonee (and, as such, runs iOS just fine), but for $200 less... would leap to buy the "myPhone." Everyone who wasn't, in fact, paying a premium for the Veblen-good nature of an expensive-product-as-status-symbol, would take the myPhone.
"Knock-off" has a negative connotation because many things can't be knocked off perfectly. But many other things can. The whole issue with media piracy is the fact that digital media can be knocked off perfectly. Many inorganic products (Coca-Cola) can be spectroscopically picked apart and cloned (though likely using an original, white-box-engineered process) to tolerances where nobody can discern the two. And organic products often have enough intra-batch variation that even with identical cultivars, differences in terroir between two crops grown half-way across the world from one-another can't be picked out from the noise of the inherent peculiarities of each individual specimen.
Growing regions are important precisely in the cases where knock-offs of things from that region won't have the qualities that the "authentic" things from that region have. That's the situation where knowing the growing region of the thing gives you useful information to influence your purchase. Otherwise, growing regions are just misbehaving, wrong-level brands—and leaky abstractions, as can be seen in the Italian olive-oil example.
Growing regions are becoming outmoded, displaced by brands. Have you tried to buy an apple lately? There are now[2] a thousand "varieties" of apple, different at every store—because those "varieties" are now simply the brands of apple-growers, instead of cultivars of apple or even growing regions for apples.
> And that is a brand. But it's a brand that exists on the "wrong level", so to speak; it's a brand held in a sort of commons that any organization is free to enter. Nobody has stewardship over such a brand.
How is that a "wrong level" ? You're creating a replicability issue to strip part of the products of their rights to brand recognition.
> I think most people, if told that they could either buy an iPhone; or buy a "myPhone"
That would be a new brand, though. The question is whether this new myPhone producer be able to market his products under the brand iPhones. Because that's what you're advocating if you're offering to let people produce "champagne" everywhere, for instance. As a matter of fact, when you say :
> Brands and growing regions are both "natural kinds", insofar as they're both things you would expect to evolve from many businesses selling a (complex) commodity from the same region
I feel you're misled. Growing region recognition is mostly about grandfathering older products, which emerged in an environment where branding was irrelevant, into modern business practices. You don't see it as much now, because everyone brands their products nowadays (e.g. you don't see Silicon Valley software, or Rust Belt autos).
I don't know how much tea flavor is from terroir. With wine, studies have debunked that concept, much to the chagrin of the French. However, naming food and drink after the region from which it originates is not monopolism, but proper labeling.
Calling sparkling wine from California Champagne is false advertising, as is calling tea from Sri Lanka Darjeeling. The name is describes where the product came from. No one is saying you can not make an identical product elsewhere, but don't claim it comes from the place it does not come from.
What if people in Romania started producing "California Zinfandel", the Chinese were selling "Texas Black Angus", or a poplar brand of "Milwaukee Cheddar" was made in southern Mexico. I think it would be at best plain weird, and at worst grossly misleading.
Yes, it is. Ignore these other people. Darjeeling in particular has a subtle sweet white grape flavor that you will taste if it is real. Not all teas have a distinct terroir but Darjeeling in particular definitely does.
I'd say, with no evidence to back me up whatsoever, that yes, tea is distinguished by its terroir.
Basically any agricultural product, especially more delicate products, have a terroir. Hops are a very good example. NZ cascade is completely different from American cascade, despite being literally the same cultivar.
