Friday 20 December 2013

BBC News - Wensleydale cheese granted protected status

BBC News reports that my favourite food (after tiramisu) has been given protection - or, rather, to be precise and pedantic, its name is now protected. But actually the story reveals that the protected geographical indication is in fact the tautology (or perhaps pleonasm) 'Yorkshire Wensleydale.' According to Food Manufacture UK (which sounds to me like an oxymoron, or at least it should be) back in 2006 when an application for a protected designation of origin was made, the applicants went for the tautology because it would give them a 'quick win'. The PGI application can be read here, complete with egregious comma splice - why can whoever commissions these documents not find someone familiar with the rules of English grammar, and with some notion of style, to do the work? And the application as published in the Official Journal C231 09.08.2013 (without comma splice) is here. But it looks to me as if the application that was originally made (dated 2007) was for a PDO and has resulted in the registration of a PGI. (It's not as if a PDO has been cancelled: the distinction of being the only UK registration to be cancelled is the Newcastle Brown Ale PGI, which became necessary when brewing was moved to what might be called the wrong side of the Tyne, though having been born in County Durham and raised there until the implication of the Redcliffe-Maud Report I would never use that expression). So they went for the more exclusive right and settled for the weaker one.

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