Are the EU regulations in place to protect the culture or are they in order to ensure for the consumer that the product is genuine? And how far does this go? Could you still sell whisky for example as long as it's not Scottish Whisky? And are people offended because they think their culture has been "stolen" or because they think the product is so inferior? And can people who are not from that background able to produce the product as long as they produce it in the required method?
Both. Producing the genuine article is often far more laborious and far more expensive to do. Usually the difference between American "Parmesan" or "Gruyère" is a) milk is coming from cows raised on factory farms, and b) aging process is shorter on a factor of
years (I think genuine Parmiggiano-Reggiano is something like minimum 2-3 years of aging, while American "Parmesan" is often under a month. I know with Gruyère, the milk is
required to come from free-ranging cows in specific Swiss/French alpine farms, while American "Gruyère-style" cheese is often, again, made with factory cows and minimal aging. In the US, the difference in price between these products is often quite stark - you can get a pound of "Parmesan" cheese retails for around $15/lb while Parmiggiano-Reggiano is more than double that, and the difference in taste is in most cases and for most people, largely imperceptible.
French and Italian governments hand out extensive subsidies to keep these cultural institutions competitive, and often enforce trade restrictions to prevent cheap American knock-offs from flooding local European markets. Partially it comes down to preserving a standard of quality and the genuine product, but part of it also is recognition that Alpine Cheeses like Swiss and Gruyère, or Italian aged cheeses like Parmiggiano-Reggiano, or traditional European alcoholic products like
Rioja or
Porto or
Champagne or
Scotch Whisky or whatever are cultural artifacts that are worth preserving in their traditional way, and the respective governments are happy to provide subsidies, tariffs, and product-restrictions that ensure both that the product is able to continue to exist
and that the form in which that product continues to exist is consistent with traditional or historical practices.
This is even more pronounced in the case of alcohol, where often times it isn't even just the distillation process alone, but rather the very region or distillery which produces it which determines who gets to call themselves what. What this means, in practice, is that it has literally nothing to do with quality, and everything to do with preserving traditional/historic cultural practices.
A Californian winery could produce a Brut with
Champagne grapes, with harvesters from Champagne, with barrels from Champagne, packaged in bottles from Champagne, using exactly the same practices and techniques as a
Champagne winery, but they will never get to sell their product as
Champagne in France, simply because they don't come from the region of
Champagne. The same is true of Scotch Whisky. If it isn't made from one of a select group of distilleries in Northern Scotland,
you don't get to call yourself Scotch Whisky and the UK has entire regulatory boards to punish people trying to pass-off their
otherwise identical "knock-off".
The US does this as well. This is the primary reason why Jack Daniels is not called Bourbon. There are literally only two things about Jack Daniels that make it not a bourbon:
1) They aren't from Kentucky
2) They have a sugar filtration process mid-distillation
Otherwise it is practically identical to bourbon in every respect, and a layman taster probably wouldn't notice a difference between Jack Daniels and, say, Jim Beam. But because it's not from Kentucky, it's rather a "Tennessee Whiskey"
