The City Law School Senior Lecturer and intellectual property specialist is investigating the protection of geographical indications for wines in trade agreements as a member of a Monash University research team, supported by the Australian Research Council.
Published (Updated )
Dr Enrico Bonadio, an intellectual property specialist and Senior Lecturer in The City Law School, is part of a team of academics exploring the legal basis for protecting geographical indications (GI) for wines such as Prosecco in trade agreements.
The AUD$100k study is funded by the Australian Research Council and is led by Melbourne’s Monash University.
Generic use
One of Dr Bonadio’s main research objectives will be to investigate whether geographical names such as Prosecco should be reserved for Italian wine producers or considered generic terms for the grape variety that anyone using such a variety can adopt.
This is an important issue as Australians and Italians are currently battling over the use of successful brands such as Prosecco -
especially so in light of the EU’s quest to classify Prosecco as a GI instead of a grape variety for wine producers outside of the northern Italy region, who are marketing and labelling wine using the grape vines as Prosecco.
The other members of the research team are Professor Mark Davison, Professor Moira Paterson, Dr Lisa Spagnolo, and Dr Caroline Henckels from Monash University’s Faculty of Law.
Australia’s annual Prosecco exports are worth $60 million and are predicted to rise over the next decade to $500 million. Prosecco grape vines were first imported from Italy in 1997, with the name for the grape used to make Prosecco since been changed to Glera.