The Legal Identity of Pinot Noir – Between Genetic Realities and Economic Imperatives

Tilman Reinhardt

Tilman.Reinhardt@uni-bayreuth.de

Alessandro Monaco

Alessandro.Monaco@uni-bayreuth.de

This paper analyzes the legal identity of Pinot Noir in light of recent developments in biotechnology. We show how technological change puts in question the foundations of the current intellectual property rights and consumer protection systems. We then propose a more flexible approach to define (and label) Pinot Noir to reconcile the interests of breeders, producers, societal sustainability goals and consumer demands.

Tilman Reinhardt PhD, Maître en droit (Université Paris II Panthéon-Assas), LLM (King’s College London) is a lawyer and agricultural economist. He works as a senior researcher and lecturer at the Chair of Food Law at the University of Bayreuth in Germany. His research focusses on innovation in food and agriculture and the development of European and International Law. He also serves as the project coordinator of the Agricultural Policy Dialogue Germany South East Europe for the German Federal Ministry of Food and Agricultural, which supports the agricultural ministries Western Balkans and Moldova in harmonization with the EU acquis related to food and agriculture. He is member of the European Association of Wine Economists and has been nominated as a German national expert in the “Law and Consumer Information” (DROCON) expert group of the Organisation International de la Vigne et du Vin (OIV).

Alessandro Monaco is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bayreuth. He earned a Bachelor´s degree in Gastronomic Sciences from the University of Gastronomic Sciences (2018) and a Master of Science in Food Safety from Wageningen University (2020). He then obtained his doctoral degree at the University of Bayreuth under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Kai Purnhagen (2025). His doctoral research was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), grant agreement 465588286 and by the Oberfrankenstiftung, grant agreement FP00535, as part of the project “Regulating Food Innovation - Technical Innovation requires Regulatory Innovation”. His research focuses on the regulation of food innovations in the European Union. In particular, he studies how authorisation procedures for novel foods and genetically modified organisms affect the innovation process within the food sector.