Seña registers official Chinese name

Chilean fine wine label Seña has officially announced its legally registered Chinese name: “赛妮娅“, a move that aims to pre-empt possible trademark infringements as the brand’s popularity grows on the mainland.

With the bilateral Free Trade Agreement between China and the South American country, Chilean wines have grown immensely in popularity, now taking up more than a 10% market share in China, third only after France and Australia.

In recent years, well-known international wineries have been mired in lengthy Chinese court cases over registered trademarks. Australia’s Penfolds only recently won a landmark legal case, giving its parent company Treasury Wine Estates the lawful right to use its translated Chinese name “Ben Fu” for its Penfolds brand.

The Chilean wine label chose this name, pronounced ‘sai ni ya’, for the phonetic proximity to its brand name, and also, for the correct Chinese characters that would faithfully represent what the name ‘Seña’ means, the winery says.

In Spanish, the word ‘Seña’ means ‘signal’ or ‘sign’, and it was chosen by its creators in the 1990s, the American wine-legend Robert Mondavi and Chilean vintner Eduardo Chadwick, to name their wine as a sign to the world that Chile was able to create world-class wines.

Thus, the winery searched for Chinese characters that would convey a similar meaning and decided on a combination of three characters with the first character alluding to a positive competition connected with Seña’s long quest to show international experts its world-class quality, as well as its contribution to positioning Chile among the world’s greatest wine countries.

The second part of the name includes two feminine symbols that relate to the finesse and elegance that the Chilean winery seeks to express through its wine, according to the winery.