Non-Alcoholic Gin Alternatives Lose in EU Court

When is gin not gin? We promise this isn’t an epistemological quiz — there will be no extensive questions about the nature of words, definitions and reality. Instead, this is about how one legal body grappled with a significant question: What is the proper term for something that tastes a lot like gin but contains no alcohol?

Whatever you call that beverage, it can’t be “gin.” That’s at least what an EU body recently ruled in a legal case that addressed the heart of — with apologies to Raymond Carver — what we talk about when we talk about spirits. As Jennifer Rankin reports at The Guardian, the case involved a product called Virgin Gin Alkoholfrei. The organization Verband Sozialer Wettbewerb (“Association for Social Competition”) filed a lawsuit against the company selling booze-free gin, arguing that to call a beverage without alcohol “gin” was misleading.

The court agreed and went on to clarify that “gin” could only be used to describe beverages that met a specific list of criteria, including the use of juniper berries and presence of ethyl alcohol. This is not the first time an EU court has decreed that a product emulating something else without specific ingredients couldn’t be labeled that way. A 2017 ruling from the same body barred businesses from using the word “butter” in the name of plant-based alternatives to butter, for example.

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EU courts are also not the only legal bodies to issue rulings along these lines. Last year, a court in the U.K. ruled that oat milk manufacturer Oatly could not trademark the phrase “Post Milk Generation” because it had to do with the presence — or, in this case, absence — of milk in Oatly’s actual product.

This feels like a significant moment for the industry, which has seen some non-alcoholic spirits manufacturers opt to be explicit about what spirit their products emulate, while others — Seedlip comes to mind — opt to create a more distinctive space. In at least some cases, this ruling means that the terminology used by these companies is going to be much more regulated, and it will be interesting to see where this takes us.

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Tobias Carroll

Tobias Carroll lives and writes in New York City, and has been covering a wide variety of subjects — including (but not limited to) books, soccer and drinks — for many years. His writing has been published by the likes of the Los Angeles Times, Pitchfork, Literary Hub, Vulture, Punch, the New York Times and Men’s Journal. At InsideHook, he has…