Italian wine still nameless

Udine, Italy -- Wine connoisseurs in Italy and elsewhere may have to find out if a Tocai by any other name will have the same bouquet.

That's because there's an international flap over the naming rights to the traditional dry white wine from northeast Italy's Friuli-Venezia Giulia region, ANSA reported Wednesday.

The Friuli-Venezia Giulia branch of Federdoc, an association of wine producers, says ''the situation has become unacceptable," the Italian news agency reported.

"It would almost be comical if it was not so serious from so many points of view," the association said. ''As it stands today, chambers of commerce which must register the Friuli wine for 2008 cannot do so because they don't know what to call it."

The wine can no longer be called Tocai because the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg ruled in 2005 that the name was too similar to that of a traditional Hungarian wine, Tokaj, even though the wines are very different -- the Hungarian wine being a honey-colored sweet or semi-sweet dessert wine and the Friulano being white and tart.

Proposals to call the Italian wine Tocai Friulano, just Friulano, Tai or even hold to the original Tocai remain snarled up in disputes among the producers.

Copyright 2008 by United Press International.