Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-09-27-Speech-2-054"
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"en.20050927.5.2-054"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, I am an MEP from the great Eastern France, a region that produces Burgundy, the wine of Alsace – Alsace, where we are today – and, of course, Champagne. I have a duty, as an MEP who is, indeed, from the Champagne region, to inform you of the following observations, since the essence of today’s debate is the start of the agreement you spoke of, Commissioner, and which you obviously wish to finalise. While we too wish for it to be finalised, it is for the reasons that I am going to expand on.
There is an economic necessity underpinning all of this. The US market, as has been pointed out several times since it was mentioned earlier, is extremely important for Europeans. In this age of globalisation, however, I would like to focus my remarks on issues related to quality. At international level, UNESCO regularly acknowledges a number of our sites of interest and buildings among the world heritage sites. Well, European wines, particularly those produced around the Mediterranean, as was pointed out earlier, have established their pedigree throughout the centuries and millennia.
In an age when, at every important moment, when a peace agreement is signed, when a family party is celebrated, etc., it is wine and, moreover, quality wine that is consumed, quality must be recognised. Yet, what has been taking place for some decades now? We have been witnessing the spread of plantations throughout the world – in Chile, in Australia, in New Zealand – and, above all, and this is what is fuelling the debate this morning, an explosion of ‘Canada Dry’. People are reproducing wines left, right and centre throughout the world, quoting denominations on the labels that allude to the vine and the region in which the wines were produced – Champagne, Bordeaux, Porto, etc. – and they are trying to make consumers believe that, in the bottle they are buying, they have a wine whose origin and quality matches what the labelling would suggest.
Commissioner, this agreement that you are going to finalise in the weeks and months to come must prevent consumers throughout the world from feeling cheated and deceived. We live in an age where the volume of counterfeit products is multiplying; we can see this taking place in the case of clothing items, with Lacoste, in the case of watches, with Rolex, and also, unfortunately, in the case of medicines. It is quite normal, natural and necessary that consumers throughout the world should be certain that a bottle of wine bearing the words ‘wine of Alsace’, ‘Burgundy’ ‘Champagne’ or ‘Port’ does indeed contain the wine in question. The quality of our world heritage is at stake, as are the interests of all our European wine producers. Long live European wine!"@en1
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