entire industry. Kendall-Jackson, on the other hand, claimed having developed a unique and protectable corporate know-how. Judge John Golden’s ruling confirmed the existence of a genuine trade secret and sanctioned the winemaker’s behaviour. It is interesting to remark that case-law on the protection of trade secrets in the wine industry is mainly concentrated in the United States and in past decades. This is no coincidence. The importance of the production processes that US companies sought to protect as trade secrets was dictated by the requests of the market at that particular time and in that specific geographical area. The American market demanded wines with a recognisable and stable taste across different years. The search for this kind of sophisticated standardisation made certain production processes essential, which, on the contrary, lose their importance in different contexts. Outside the American trend of those years, terroir is the set of factors that determines the character of wine, in a way that, with the same know-how, production processes and winery practices, wineries located on neighbouring hills will produce wines with different characteristics, due to the soil. This is the reason why, outside the cases mentioned and the field of aromatised and sparkling wines, trade secrets play a less significant role in the world of wine. III. RECIPES AND COPYRIGHT As mentioned, the issue of the legal protection of recipes can also be approached in a different way, whenever recipes are not secret. In these cases, the question arises as to whether an original recipe can benefit from copyright protection. Of course, copyright protection does not imply an exclusive monopoly on the execution of the recipe. Otherwise, the spread of new dishes and delicacies would be blocked. On the contrary, the dissemination of the recipe determines the success of the chef who invented it, and this latter has an interest in being recognised as the creator of the recipe: the so-called right to fatherhood. In this connection, the Court of Milan, in its ruling no. 9763 of 10 July 2013, acknowledged that recipes can be protected under Italian Copyright Law, but that such a protection does not extend to the content of the recipe, being limited to its expressive form, i.e. the precise way in which the recipe is described and explained in a cookbook: “indeed, it is not the content of the recipes for the various types of cold cuts or the instructions for carrying out the various stages of their preparation that is at issue, but rather the expressive form of the same which must be considered relevant for the purposes of the protection sought”. The ruling of the Court of Milan appears balanced and 213 PROTECTION OF RECIPES AND TASTE UNDER ITALIAN LAW
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