As this region is so reliant on food and wine, the possibility of producers having to rebrand their wine and cheese will be a huge and expensive challenge.

It’s also ludicrous and unnecessary.

Prosecco, for one, has a distinct taste profile and buying it off the shelf, a consumer has a pretty good idea of what they’re purchasing.

If winemakers are forced to use the term “prosecco-like”, does this mean consumers will think the bottle might be of lower quality, or not made from prosecco grapes?

For winemakers who have spent a long time perfecting their products, this could be damaging for their labels.

Cheese is a particularly challenging one as well, given the wide variety of styles available.

How can a consumer know what cheese they are buying unless the original term can be used? How can we know the difference between a parmesan and a pecorino, a gruyere and a cheddar? 

As we saw with Champagne in France, the origin of a brand is important to producers in many parts of the world. 

But labelling laws have moved on – a discerning customer after the real thing, as it were, will look for where a product is made and make their decision accordingly. 

Confusing a customer about what style of wine or cheese they are buying may scare them off a product altogether. 

Orange winemakers have been on the other side of the labelling battle in the past, when winemakers in other regions were producing late-harvest wines and calling it orange wine, referring literally to the drink’s colour. 

But they won that battle, and rightly so, because there was a genuine possibility of confusing the top-quality bottles from this region with a lower-quality product.

In short, the name could encapsulate multiple styles of wine. 

As Second Mouse Cheese Company’s SJ Pienaar said, there may well be opportunities to be creative and expand into other styles of products unique to Australia, which might generate their own demand. 

But the Australian government’s attempt to add the term “Australian” to any product exported to Europe would be far simpler and would not hinder that creativity.  

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