Court Decides "Gruyere" Is Not "Champagne"

It's a sad day for great cheese

It must have been 20 years ago now, but I haven’t forgotten. I was prepping for a dinner party with a friend who had traveled to my place for the party. It was early in the day and I was making sure all the ingredients were in place. I like this part of the dinner party preparation.

As I checked stuff on the ingredient list I realized as I was going over my Gougeres recipe that I didn’t have the Gruyere cheese necessary to make Gougeres. I asked my friend to run down to Whole Foods to pick up a nice hunk.

When she came back, she had cheese with her. I looked at it and said to her, “This isn’t Gruyere. Go back and get the real thing.” She retorted, “It SAYS Gruyere right here.”

“It’s not really Gruyere,” I insisted.

“But it says so right here.”

“Gruyere,” I explained, “comes from specific regions in France or Switzerland and is made in a very specific way. This, my darling, was made in Wisconsin. It’s not real ‘Gruyere’. Go back to the store, return this, and ask for the real thing.”

She looked at the pedant in front of her with that tilted head, exhaled a heavy sigh, turned on her heels, and left for the store.”

I was reminded of this when today I read a ruling out of the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals that ended with this line:

“In sum, the [Cheese] Consortiums cannot overcome what the record makes clear: cheese consumers in the United States understand “GRUYERE” to refer to a type of cheese, which renders the term generic.”