Don Quixote Cheese Labels May Infringe Manchego Protections

(CN) - Cheese labels featuring images of the literary character Don Quixote de La Mancha may illegally evoke the protected designation for manchego, the European Court of Justice ruled Thursday. 

The dispute originated in Spain where a company called Industrial Quesera Cuquerella SL has been marketing three cheeses it calls Rocinante.

The name is the same as that of the fictional horse ridden by Don Quixote in the novel by Miguel de Cervantes, and the packaging of the cheeses drive that connection home further with illustrations of a knight and his bony horse, standing in a windmill- and sheep-dotted landscape.

None of the three Industrial Quesera Cuquerella products are covered by the protected designation of origin for the popular cheese known as manchego, and the Queso Manchego Foundation argued that the company was evoking that status improperly.

As noted in Thursday’s ruling, the PDO or protected designation of origin for queso manchego covers a sheep’s milk cheese from La Mancha, produced in the traditional fashion.

The foundation took its case to Spain’s Supreme Court after failing to persuade both a trial judge and the Provincial Court in Albacete that the Rocinante cheeses were trading improperly on the manchego name.

Asked to weigh in on the matter, the Luxembourg-based European Court of Justice determined Thursday that the foundation may have a case.

“In the present case, the referring court must ensure that the figurative signs at issue in the main proceedings, in particular the illustrations of a character resembling Don Quixote de La Mancha, a bony horse and landscapes with windmills and sheep, are capable of creating conceptual proximity with the PDO ‘queso manchego’ so that the image triggered directly in the consumer’s mind is that of the product protected by that PDO,” the ruling states.

Follow @bleonardcns

Subscribe to Closing Arguments

Sign up for new weekly newsletter Closing Arguments to get the latest about ongoing trials, major litigation and hot cases and rulings in courthouses around the U.S. and the world.

Email *

Submit