Australian-based Treasury Wine Estates (TWE), the owner of the Penfolds brand of wine, has secured an important win in China’s legal system to protect its brand integrity.
The Supreme People’s Court of China recently ruled in favour of TWE in a long battle against Penfolds copycat operator, Rush Rich. The latter’s registration of the Chinese character mark for Penfolds Winery was ruled invalid. Rush Rich was charged for illicit conduct of registering a large number of trademarks for a range of global luxury brands from Penfolds to luxury carmaker Bentley.
TWE has been battling against Rush Rich, a South Australian-based company which also had entities in China, for 6 years through the courts in China and Australia.
The court win is vital for TWE as it is preparing to launch soon a Chinese-made version of Penfolds in China. The ‘made in China’ Penfolds will sell for between A$30 (US$20.10) and A$50 (US$33.50) a bottle and have cabernet grapes as the main component sourced from wine-making regions Ningxia, in China’s central-north, and Shangri-La, in the south-western Yunnan province.
TWE’s new Chinese-made Penfolds is one of the company’s responses to the punishing tariffs imposed by the Chinese government in November 2020 on Australian wine, which decimated the biggest export market for TWE. TWE, which also makes Wolf Blass, Wynns and 19 Crimes, had the largest wine export business to China of any Australian wine company and was hit the hardest with a 175.6% tariff.
These tariffs are scheduled to run until 2025, and could be extended if the geopolitical tensions between China and the Western world continue unabated.
