This page was created by Ben Rearick. 

"We're on the same latitude as Bordeaux!": Networking Territory in the Columbia Valley AVA

History of Denomination of Origin and Viticultural Areas

Denomination of Origin (DO) is an intellectual property signifier that has been taken up across the globe to distinguish "authentic" consumer goods and products. DOs can be applied to a wide range of commodities. For example, in 2005, Starbucks launched a marketing campaign that set out to explain terroir as applied to coffee. For example, in Networking Peripheries, Anita Chan explores the role of DO in the Peruvian pottery market. Coffee is another common example -- in 2005, Starbucks even created a marketing campaign to educate their customers about DO coffee as a means to sell their new line of single-origin beans. DO and other intellectual property codes are strongly connected with global trade and neoliberal economic structures, as Chan explains:

"Since the World Trade Organization's adoption of the Trade-related Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPS) Agreement in the mid-1990s--which underscored IP's role in global economic productivity and stressed the need to standardize international protections--nations, rich and poor alike, have accelerate efforts to develop and register IP rights and to strengthen the legal infrastructures for national deployment and global coordination" (25).

While DO is used in many industries, the system is most prominently applied to wine. The US began regulating viticultural areas in the late 1970s. The US' viticultural area system was directly based on the appelation d'origine controlee system, which was legalized in 1905 (Instit National De L'Origine et de la Qualite). In "Wine Appellation as Territory," geographer Warren Moran delineates the distinction between general geographic indications and and wine appellations. "Geographic indications are simply the attestation that the grapes from which the wine is made originate from a particular region, locality, or field" (Moran 697). By contrast , Appelation d'origine controlee, the French model for designating wine origin, which has been taken up across the world, is more stringent: "Appelations have a series of other agreed restrictions, such as authorized varieties of grapes, yields of grapes or wine per hectare, viticultural methods, and sometimes winemaking techniques to which the producers of each appellation must adhere if they are to use authorized place names" (Moran 697). In short, as wine is maintained the oldest and most prominent DO codes, legal distinctions tend to be even more strict.

Learn more about the Washington State wine industry by jumping to this page.

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