Behind the headlines: Petrus vs Petrus Lambertini

The recent news that Petrus had won a legal battle over trademark infringement made headlines world over, as things often do when Petrus is involved.

The €1.2 million fine that was awarded as damages was certainly painful. But this recent victory is only the latest round in a long, and rather strange legal battle that I thought you might be interested in learning a little more about – and there’s no guarantee that it’s over yet.

The case first started way back in 2011, when a French négociant called GCM Vins applied to register a rather long-winded but innocuous-sounding trademark – Coureau & Coureau Petrus Lambertini Major Burdegalensis 1208. The trademark was registered within article 33 of the industrial property law, covering ‘Wines of Appellation of Origin’.

Petrus, as is typical for all the major wine estates in Bordeaux, would have been immediately alerted to the name Petrus appearing in a new registration attempt, and filed an opposition based on its prior trademark registration of the word Petrus in the context of wine.

At first, the French trademark office rejected this, considering that the term Petrus couldn’t be regarded as the dominant word in an eight-word brand name, meaning that they were sufficiently different that consumers would have no difficulty in discerning between the two. Coureau & Coureau were, after all, two brothers Jérôme and Stéphane, and the wine they were attempting to register was named after, they said, Petrus Lambertini, who was mayor of Bordeaux in 1208, and who was known for refusing to hand over the keys to the city to the King of Castille. Burdigala is a former name of Bordeaux, used widely until the Middle Ages.

Even this fact becomes strange when you dig a little deeper, as Bordeaux town hall’s own website names the first mayor of the city, voted on April 20 1208, as Pierre Lambert. He was appointed by Jean San Terre – the nickname became John Lackland in English – youngest son of Eleanor of Aquitaine and Henry II. So we already have a little creative license used to turn Pierre into the Latin Petrus (both, it must be said, versions of the Anglicised name Peter), along with the Latinised version of Lambert into Lambertini. You’ll find his name, as Pierre Lambert, engraved on a plaque within the Pey-Berland cathedral.

An uneasy truce might have been maintained except a few years later, GCM Vins used its trademark on the label of a wine bottle where the words Petrus Lambertini were clearly visible, and the words ‘Major Burdegalensis 1208’ more subtly displayed within an image of a pair of keys. And even worse, in the eyes of the Pomerol icon, the number ‘2’ was displayed prominently underneath.

In response, Petrus filed both civil and criminal complaints (first in 2015 and then again in 2020 against both CGM and a new company Direct Chais), arguing that the use of the ‘no 2’ on the label constituted a clear attempt to pass off the wine as a 2nd wine of Petrus, despite the GCM wine bottled as AOC Bordeaux. The case was referred to the Bordeaux Criminal Court, which in 2016 found GCM guilty of misleading commercial practice.

This decision was then over-ruled by the Bordeaux Court of Appeal – and Petrus itself appealed again, all the way to the French Supreme Court known as the Cour de Cassation.

In a decision dated 12 June 2019, the Cour de Cassation confirmed the decision of the Court of Appeal, putting a definitive end to the criminal charges. The Court held that even if the contested trade mark was cleverly used to emphasise the name Petrus Lambertini, the consumer was unlikely to be convinced that it was associated with Petrus, that they could see that it was not from Pomerol – and further than they could easily verify that Petrus doesn’t produce a second wine.

Even the fact that the Petrus Lambertini wine was so inexpensive, coming in at around €14 per bottle, was given as a reason to not uphold the complaint, as consumers could reasonably expect a 2nd wine of Petrus to be far more expensive and as such, again, would not be confused. The ruling stated that, given all of this, the GCM wine did not constitute a misleading action within the French consumer code, and that the Petrus brand reputation was not harmed.

It seemed, to most observers (and there were a lot of them, mainly trademark lawyers) a strange conclusion, not least because the court specifically stated that choosing the Latin name Petrus Lambertini over the much-more-typically-used Pierre Lambert for the mayor’s name was a clever marketing choice that would attract attention. One of the more interesting thought pieces I read was on the issues surrounding simulations (‘illegitimate products designed to look like but not exactly copy the legitimate product’) rather than specific forgeries from the Food Fraud Prevention Think Tank.

The most recent ruling on May 16, 2023, where Petrus was successful for the first time since 2016 and awarded €1.18million in damages (€500,000 for moral prejudice and €680,000 against the material benefits GCM Vins gained as a result), came as an outcome of the civil, not the criminal, case – and even here the Coureau brothers have vowed to appeal the decision.

A spokesman for Petrus said via email that they ‘congratulate the Bordeaux tribunal for finding CGM Vins and Direct Chais guilty of parasitical commercial practices…’, and that Petrus remains ‘fiercely committed to protecting its brand in France and around the world’ in order to ‘guarantee to consumers verified and accurate information about the commercial origin of products identified under the name Petrus.’

As I said, the conflicting criminal and civil decisions make this a particularly confusing and convoluted case, and one that is not over yet. Even the email sent out on behalf of Petrus on May 17, 2023 came in two parts. The first one with the comment from the spokesperson as given above, and a second one, just a short while later, with a few words added to the quotation:

‘This decision is subject to appeal’.