Chinese fake it with counterfeits of Australian wines

As mentioned in the title, chinese entrepreneurs are alleged for counterfeiting Australian wine, including their best-known brands, Penfolds, and promoting the fakes as quality wines in shops and trade fairs throughout the country. Surprisingly, even a small Australian wine producer from the southern Flinders Ranges also claimed to be one of the victims of Chinese counterfeiters. This might threaten the Australian wine industry's $143 million trade with China. For your information, China is Australia's fastest growing export wine market. From 2004, wine exports have surged by 84 per cent annually and in the last financial year 46 million litres of Australian wine landed in China: 21.5 million litres in bottle and 23.5 million litres in bulk.

''But brand pirating is not a huge threat to our industry because, apart from Penfolds, Australian brands don't yet have levels of awareness, or aren't in the price bracket to make them attractive pirate brand candidates. There are isolated cases - but it's not our biggest threat,'' said Matt Bahen, deputy general manager of Australian-owned wine distributor, The Wine Republic, in north China.

''Our biggest threat is cheapening 'brand Australia' with random branding in the hope of dumping more containers in China. If we start off cheap and treat Chinese consumers as fools then it's going to bite us.''

The trade fair stall and its promotional material looked highly ''proprietorial'', according to Penfolds' Melbourne-based intellectual property lawyer, Stephen Stern of Corrs Chambers Westgarth.

It even displayed pictures of Penfolds winemaker Peter Gago.

Critique: Counterfeit is always a sensational issue. Just like plagiarism, it undermine people's hardworks for creating the products or racking the ideas. Doubtless, it is hearts broken to see our hardworks being creditted to someone else who was stealing our ideas. Therefore, authorities in charged should always take this matter into serious consideration before the widespread of this issue becoming the scourge in the society.