In a win for Australia's esteemed wine brand
Penfolds, the Federal Court ordered Australian company Rush Rich
Winery to pay nearly $400,000 in compensation and immediately cease
producing wine that is a blatant copy of Penfolds' Chinese
branding.
In China, Penfolds operates as "Ben fú" which
is the Mandarin and Cantonese language phonetic approximation of
'Penfolds'. Rush Rich labelled and exported over a million
bottles of wine which bore the equivalent Chinese character trade
marks (奔富, for those really into the detail). The
Court held the trade mark infringement was so blatant that Rush
Rich had no reasonable prospects of defending the claim and granted
summary judgment.
The Rush Rich matter was a straight forward case; however, it
highlights the growing global issue of fake wine. Yes, wine fraud,
it's a thing. Unbeknown to the average palate, counterfeit and
copycat wines are a multi-billion-dollar problem to the global wine
industry. As Australia's wine
