Gin for Lunch

I am going through my notes from the various drinking meetings I've had the past few days, and posting random tidbits here. I had lunch yesterday with Sean Harrison, Master Distiller at Plymouth Gin, who was in town for a couple of days. We did a gin tasting that was really informative. I'll probably cover that in a future article sometime. But the quote of the day was Harrison saying, "The only difference between a novice and an expert is vocabulary." I can say after the tasting that I do know a lot more words to get me closer to that end. Here is something else I learned. Plymouth Gin is a protected GI (geographical indication) like Champagne and Cognac. Thus, only gins distilled in the Plymouth region of England can be called Plymouth gins. However, Plymouth is the only gin distillery in that GI. If I understand this correctly, within the European Union, all countries have to respect these GIs. So if another gin set up shop next door to Plymouth, they could call themselves a brand of Plymouth gin. To prevent this from actually happening, Plymouth has copyrighted everything possible on their label, such as the word "original" and the picture of the boat. However, in other countries without the GI agreement (or perhaps the particular GI agreement that holds in England,) such as the U.S., the company is able to copyright the term Plymouth Gin, so in the U.S. there can't be another Plymouth gin. I'm not entirely sure how this is possible, but it's interesting in any case.