Wine Law

4 no restraint was put for the commerce of wine. Indeed, it was only between 1976 and 1978, with the ban on planting and the obligation to distil the surplus, that the market organisation adopted the interventionist approach that nowadays characterises it 6 . A milestone in the process of European integration was, of course, the signing, on 7 February 1992, of the Maastricht Treaty (officially, the “Treaty on European Union”), whereby the European Economic Community was renamed the European Community (EC) to underscore the bridging of economic boundaries and the start of a process designed to integrate the member countries into a single political entity. Later on, the EC took the definitive name of “European Union”, with the coming into force, on 1 December 2009, of the Treaty of Lisbon (Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union), which strengthened the institutional architecture of the Union from the legislative and financial viewpoints as well. In the meantime, Community lawmakers began to realise that the notion of quality associated with the designated geographic area was a valuable instrument for the enhancement of wine products 7 . In 1962, shortly after the Treaty of Rome created the European Economic Community (EEC or “Common Market”), a set of rules were drawn up, in which the common organisation of the market for a type of product – generally limited to a pricing system, rules on intervention and a system for trade with third-party countries – was extended in several areas in order to accommodate the diverse interests of wine production within individual Member States. As it was mentioned above, the first Common Market Organisation (CMO) was born: the wine sector required technical aspects to be regulated, such as, among others, protection of geographical names and, obviously, rules on designation and presentation. Accordingly, Regulation (EEC) No. 24 of 4 April 1962 on the progressive establishment of a common organisation of the market in wine ratified the birth of Quality Wines Produced in Specified Regions (QWPSR), in view of the principle that “it accords with the policy of encouraging quality production that the required characteristics of a quality wine produced in specified regions should be defined”. Under 6 L’organizzazione comune del mercato del vino , in A. Germanò, E. Rook Basile & N. Lucifero, Manuale di legislazione vitivinicola , Giappichelli, Turin, 2017. 7 See G. Allaire, F. Casabianca & E. Thévenod-Mottet, Geographical origin: A complex feature of agro-food products, in Labels of origin for food: local development, global recognition , cared by E. Barham & B. Sylvander, Wallingford, CABI, 2011.