Australia has now joined the WTO challenge regarding BC\’s grocery store wine sales model. The number of regions in the challenge now numbers five: the United States, the European Union, New Zealand, Argentina and Australia. Canada has accepted the requests of these counties to join the challenge. Details are on the WTO site.
Month: February 2017
Argentina has now joined the United States, the European Union and New Zealand in their challenge to the BC government\’s grocery store wine sales model. The challenge relates to the implementation of grocery store wine sales that allow 100% BC wine to be sold on regular grocery shelves but which requires that any imported wine be sold in a separate \”store within a store\”. To date, no grocery stores have opened the latter sales model while the former model is rolling out slowly across the province. This topic will be discussed further at Tuesday\’s Wine Law Conference in Vancouver. Additional analysis of the challenge was featured in this Vancouver Sun article by Karen Graham.
The European Union and New Zealand have now both formally requested to join the WTO dispute, initiated recently by the U.S., regarding the BC wine in grocery model (which permits the sale of only BC wine on regular grocery store shelves). See here for details. This trade topic has now been added to the agenda of the Wine Law Conference, to be held next Tuesday in Vancouver.