The Swiss town of Champagne clear to use his name

CHAMPAGNE (AFP) - One hundred residents of Champagne, a small village at the foot of the Jura Mountains, have expressed Saturday for the right to continue using the name of their town, they can already put on their bottles of wine.
Since 2004, an agreement between Switzerland and the European Union prohibits local winemakers call their wine "Champagne".
Located across the lake of Neuchatel in canton Vaud (southwestern Switzerland), the vineyards of the commune of Champagne, cultivated since the Middle Ages, and which produces a white wine for local consumption, are at the centre of a Swiss winegrowers dispute between french and for nearly a decade.
But their counterparts in the French region of Champagne, which produce wine with the same name, have recently revived the anger of residents of this village of 713 inhabitants in trying to prohibit the local industrial bakery to include "recipe Champagne" on its biscuits.
More than a hundred villagers gathered just before noon Saturday near a sign with the "Champagne" which was subsequently overturned by a tractor on which floated a flag french. "It is not a question of money but a question of identity," says Thomas Bindschedler, spokesman for a committee set up to thwart proposed french. "We are not talking about just law enforcement. We are talking about people who live here, who were born here, whose families have lived here for centuries, which make wine here," he adds.
The official documents indicate that the village exists under the name Champagne for more than a millennium.
In 2004, the Swiss government had acceded to a request from french Champenois by prohibiting Swiss villagers to use the name Champagne for white wine wine since renamed "Freedom Champ."
As a result, sales fell by 110,000 bottles in 2000 to 32,000 in 2008, according to Mr. Bindschedler.
The village mayor, Marc-Andre Cornu, also owner of the bakery founded in 1934 and employs 80 people, said that it would lose 500,000 euros if he no longer had the right to use the name "Champagne recipe" .

A few years ago, YSL debaptised had a perfume (appointed by the continued Yvresse) ....

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