Y'know, as someone who spends a considerable chunk of cash on imported wine, this really, really pisses me off.
Would the vintners be allowed to communicate the information in a different place from the label -- could they distribute a pamphlet with their bottles of wine describing how it is aged and so forth? Or is it the information itself that is contraband, regardless of where it is printed?
Slightly OT, but can someone explain why I so rarely find the Nobile de Montepulciano here?
It makes me very very cross as well. Monsanto's claim (and also the claim in EU cases involving GM foods and hormones in meat) is that the speech regulation is for consumer protection (i.e. since there's no definitive proof that rBGH is bad for you, stating that it is absent could confuse people), but clearly that's bullshit.
(Not, y'know, on this site, but in the States?)
Yeah, I had some seriously built-up crossness about the rBGH thing, and this set all of that off. Powerful industries trying to use the law to keep competitors from making truthful claims because it's unfair annoys me unspeakably.
The wine thing doesn't impact me personally so much. For some reason, I have an inability to remember anything about wine beyond what color it is -- while I like good wine when someone orders it for me, nothing about it sticks. So mostly I happily drink whatever plonk is reasonably cheap.
Slightly OT, but can someone explain why I so rarely find the Nobile de Montepulciano here?
Unfogged doesn't have an off-license.
Or oh, oh! They could implant an RFID chip in the cork which transmits the wine's vital statistics, and sell a PalmWino reader with LCD-screen that just needs to be passed over the top of the bottle to give you your information.
Also: are vintners inside the US already prohibited from communicating this information? Will wine they sell domestically be affected by the law?
can someone explain why I so rarely find the Nobile de Montepulciano here
I can find it (I love my wine store), but never for cheap.
You know where I found tons of it, though? When I was in Montepulciano, that shit was everywhere.
In our house we like us some Saumur Champigny, but also hard to find. If it's any comfort, it was very hard to find good California wine in Europe. Mostly what you saw was Gallo or equivalent, so that when you said to a European, they make good wine in California, they laughed at you.
For that matter, hard to get good California wine in New York State.
Is there a clear distinction between persiflage and badinage? Is someone who engages in one or the other a persifleur / badineur? Ought we not to combat teh o-earnest by teaching our young the gifts of lighter rhetoric?
Just, you know, askin'.
hard to get good California wine in New York State
Really?
For equivalent quality, I'm told French is cheaper.
Really?
I found it to be so. Though I should clarify: it is hard to get the less obvious, more bang-for-buck varieties. Which is to say, LB is right, inasmuch as if you walked into a wine shop on, say, Columbus and 75th, you were much more likely to find nice French wines priced reasonably than nice California wines priced reasonably.
And it was even worse as you went further upstate. This intelligence is, however, now about a decade old, so.
I usually drink French wine when I'm on the east coast and CA wine when I'm on the west coast (which will be my situation tomorrow, and the following day, and the day following that one! Yay!)
(Any Modesto-area lurkers who want to meet up? Any Sonora or Knights Ferry lurkers? We'll be going up to the foothills on Saturday. (Hm. Looks like I omitted one "day following that one.")
Oh and come to think of it, I think we will be visiting San Ramon or thereabouts on Friday -- so any Livermore lurkers, give me a holler.
Yes, for equivalent quality, French is cheaper than Californian in New York City. Hell, even in California I was shocked by how steep the prices were.
I also love Saumur Champigny, and it annoys me to no end that I can't find it anywhere. When I was in France, I hardly ever got a chance to drink it because my then-boyfriend was absolutely unreasonable about the giant nuclear plants located smack in the middle of those particular vineyards. (Me: But there are giant nuclear plants all over France! Him: But I can see those ones!) We broke up before I could get him a damned Geiger counter. Anyway, it's a great light red, goes with anything.
Yeah, Saumur itself is kind of a pit. But the surrounding countryside! Plus, Eugènie Grandet.
French is cheaper than Californian in New York City
That's surprising, particularly given the current exchange rate. You should come buy your wine in North Carolina. Apparently, the RTP area is wine central.
A story I once heard, not sure of its veracity, but it illustrates my point, so what the hell:
A man bought a salmon cannery. He hoped to make it a success, but the new process he developed turned the canned salmon white. Not at all appealing. So he created a label for the cans of salmon, which bore the slogan: "Guaranteed not to turn pink in the can."
Now, his statement is true. He can probably guarantee that his bleached salmon won't turn pink. But there seems to be something wrong with this advertising campaign; it tells a truth which implies false things about competitor's products.
So, I don't think that whatever's going on with the rBGH hormone labelling and the wine labelling is a freedom of speech issue.
That said, I think there's good reasons to label the product fully, but it's just not the case that any true statement can't be misleading. And the bigger worry is what LB said above; the labelling isn't done by some unbiased consideration of what it will imply, but by powerful industry lobbying.
Hey you know what I like a lot, which is cheap cheap cheap hereabouts? This Spanish red wine that has a little plastic bull hanging off the top of the bottle. I think it's called "Sangre de Toro" but am not sure. Something de Toro anyways. It's about $7/bottle (or was last time I bought it, I guess last September or so) and extremely tasty.
Apparently, the RTP area is wine central
One of these days I'm gonna get my act together and apply for one of those fancy fellowships there. Then I can sit and get drunk on inexpensive high-grade wine and overly intellectualize my opinions about sex-reassignment surgery. Or that season's Panthers / Bucs games. Whichever.
That sounds like an ambition, don't it?
I wouldn't call the salmon claim comparable -- the implication it makes (that cans not bearing that claim contain salmon that turned pink in the can) is false. In the claims we're talking about, the implications (that wines not claiming to be made using artisanal methods may not have been; that food not claiming to be free of genetic modification may not be; that milk not claiming to come from cows not treated with rGBH may have come from cows treated with rGBH) are true. The argument for restricting such speech is that consumers will be improperly influenced by these truthful claims, because they may have other mistaken beliefs (that artisanally made wines taste better; that rGBH and GM foods are dangerous to health). But those beliefs, if mistaken, are not created by the claim on the label.
I'm not sure; the implication in the salmon case is that something is undesirable about pink salmon, not just that it turned pink in the can. Or simply that competitor's salmon is pink, and that there's something wrong with that.
And I think you get the same sort of negative implication with the wine and milk labelling; the advertiser can create that negative impression by putting the words on the label. Otherwise why would they bother to distinguish that they don't use rBGH(GBHGHFBH whatever)?
I suspect that I could put 'Our orange juice is 100% free of rBGH, a hormone linked in some medical studies to increased risk of ovarian cancer' on a label, and create a perception that there was really something wrong with my competitor's orange juice. Or my favorite Fahrenheit 9/11 moment: Moore chases down a Congressman, demanding to know if he sent his kids to Iraq. The Congressman has no children, but the implication works.
That's the trick of the implication; let someone else's false beliefs delude them. I agree with you, but I think the rule of thumb has to be more narrow than just a freedom to say true things.
What you can say on your alcohol label tends to be even more restricted that just the salmon example. I think that wineries only recently were granted the right to say something along the lines of "Recent studies indicate that moderate consumption of wine can have beneficial effects on the heart." This flew in the face of the long-established taboo against claiming any health effects whatsoever. Or beer, closer to my own heart. Sure, we shouldn't be able to claim that it's Fat Free!, but beer does contain a good amount of calcium, and I am legally barred from saying so on a label.
Of course, there are new regs in the air that would compel us to print those fancy graphics relating a 12oz beer to a glass of wine to a shot of liquor warning you that you can only have two of those before crashing and dying and taking out another family driving home from church. Too much beer can get you drunk, it seems. Who knew?
I'm not sure how I feel about commercial speech coming under the protections of the First Amendment, though for the foreseeable future it does. False and/or misleading advertising isn't protected, though.
The wine labeling restriction really sucks. Special interest groups suck (you know who you are, NRA, various industries and corporations, Duke Cunningham, the Sierra Club). But it leads me to wonder...
Is commercial speech/advertising really the kind of speech intended to be protected by the First Amendment? Isn't commercial speech simply another form of economic activity? Shouldn't the courts let the legislatures decide how to regulate such economic activity?
Aside from the First Amendment, is it a good idea to protect commercial speech at all from regulation?
Well, 'time, place, and manner' regulations are (loosely) okay under the First Amendment. I'm pretty happy with allowing the First Amendment to cover commercial speech, partially because commercial speech isn't necessarily just commercial.
For example, one argument against the use of rBGH, is an animal rights argument -- that the added milk production and resulting health problems are cruel to the treated cows. My guess is that some organic dairies are interested in speaking to this issue, and see a claim on their products that they don't use rBGH as political speech for that reason. Ought it to have no protection merely because it is also advertising? From the other side, what about a news story written only to attract readers, with no motivation beyond the purely commercial -- if commercial speech weren't protectable, why should such news coverage be protected.
I just don't see a clear conceptual line between commercial and non-commercial speech.
Some of you New Yorkers ought to try some of the New York State wines. There are some nice vineyards in the Finger Lakes region.
And Eastern Long Island. I grew up with a weekend place right near all the LI vineyards, and some of them produce decent wine.
I just don't see a clear conceptual line between commercial and non-commercial speech.
One's used to sell a product, one isn't. Look, I get what you're saying: it's weird that political support of animal rights is fine to say, and protected speech as long as you're not using it to sell something.
And I think rBGHGHBH (I'm actually not sure what the acronym is) counts as something that should be allowed on product packaging. But I'm not sure the distinction's all that bad, especially in situations where the information is false or misleading.
(E.g., it's fine to have in the medical packaging that Ortho TriCyclen Lo can't harm a fetus, but it's probably weird to put it prominently on the packaging to imply that other birth control pills cause miscarriages.)
BGH=Bovine Growth Hormone, While I can't type anything accurately to save my life, that's the right acronym.
it's weird that political support of animal rights is fine to say, and protected speech as long as you're not using it to sell something.
It's protected speech even if you are using it to sell something. Commercial speech isn't (and I think shouldn't be) a First Amendment-free zone.
rBGH. Okay. I knew it was bovine growth hormone, but I wasn't sure if there was a fancier name whence the acronym originated and I figured if you and I differed, you were probably right because goodness knows I don't proofread.
I don't know too much about First Amendment protections, but I do remember from what little I learned that whether speech or not counts as protected is awfully context-sensitive. The example I remember, back in the haze, was the young activist yelling that corn dealers starve the poor. Protected speech in the newspaper or on the street corner, but not protected if he's standing in front of a mob of angry corn farmers.
I'd have to think about this more.
The main reason some farmers want to put "was not produced using Bovine Growth Hormone" is because milk is not required to be labelled whether or not it is produced using BGH.
My preferred solution would be to require such labelling for animal derived products (i.e. information on raising practices), and then consumers can make up their own mind.
But because the lobby for large industrial dairies and their distributors has blocked this, the small dairy farmers are trying to inform concerned consumers via the "does not contain" route, and so Big Dairy / Big Food is also seeking to ban this alternative.
While I agree that there can be an implied "because it's bad for you" in the simple statement that something does not contain an additive commonly used in the production of that type of food, I still think it's a minor concern and should take a backseat to maximum information for consumers to allow informed consumer choice.
Cheap good California wine: Joel Gott sauv blanc. Nice stuff, about $10. I can't buy it where I live, because California wines are impossible to find there. Bastards.
So who supports the big food concerns in this kind of endeavor? I'd guess republicans, but I know they're committed to the free market, the proper functioning of which requires that producers be able to label their products in such a way as to disseminate information to consumers and maximize efficiency. So not them. And democrats love the little guy and hate Big Anything, so not them.
I wish I knew more about wine, but I don't think I'm rich enough.
I wish I knew more about wine, but I don't think I'm rich enough.
Ya gotta get your priorities straight, Cala.
I'd guess republicans, but I know they're committed to the free market, the proper functioning of which requires that producers be able to label their products in such a way as to disseminate information to consumers and maximize efficiency.
They certainly say that they're committed to the free market. But then, steel tarriffs.
While I agree that there can be an implied "because it's bad for you" in the simple statement that something does not contain an additive commonly used in the production of that type of food, I still think it's a minor concern and should take a backseat to maximum information for consumers to allow informed consumer choice.
I guess I mostly agree with this. However, the concerns are not always so minor.
For example, there are, no doubt, Europeans (and others) who have legitimate concerns about the safety of genetically engineered food. The fact remains that others have raised this issue--despite scant scientific support--merely to create another barrier to US agriculrutal products in the EU, many influential members of which which traditionally have engaged in protection and support of local agricultural interests agricultural that far exceeds what the US has done (if such a thing can be imagined). So, for example, the debate about genetically engineered food is as much a debate over acceptable means of protecting local industry as it is about promoting informed consumer choice.
That said, I would agree that it's better to let people make true claims that could mislead than to stop from them making true claims about their products.
I wasn't sure if there was a fancier name whence the acronym originated
Bovine Somatotropin (BST)? I'm pretty sure that's BGH in a lab coat.
That's true, Idealist, and European protection of their big farmers at the expense of both US big farmers and small farmers on both sides of the Atlantic has been a significant motivator in the GM food controversy.
My response would be that the answer is more speech, not less. That is, instead of being able to ban the accurate labelling of food products, US producers and exporters should have to try to convince the public that the scientific evidence is scant and they have little or nothing to fear from GM foods.
I agree that it's difficult sometimes to draw the line between commercial and non-commercial speech, and I don't recall the courts having articulated a good test to distinguish the two, beyond a primary purpose test (is the primary purpose of the speech to sell a product) or a solicitation to purchase test.
But difficulty in distinguishing the two, and the existence of ambiguous cases, doesn't mean that all commercial speech would be difficult to identify. The vast majority of commercial speech is easily identifiable as such.
Imho, the First Amendment was intended to protect political speech, and perhaps other forms of personal and important expression (literary, artistic, etc). But intended to protect the ability of a business to attract customers? Eh...