In July of 2013, a French wine giant that owns three chateaus in Bordeaux was ordered by a Chinese court to pay 33.73 million yuan, about 5.5 million US dollars, to a wine importer in Wenzhou. The company on the hook was Castel Freres, one of the largest wine producers in the world. The man who beat them, Li Daozhi, wasn't even fighting over the name "Castel." He was fighting over a Chinese name Castel had been using for years without ever bothering to check who actually owned it.
Here's the setup, and it's a genuinely avoidable mistake. In China, Castel's wine had long been marketed and sold under the Chinese name 卡斯特 (kǎ sī tè), commonly rendered in English coverage as "Kasite," a straightforward phonetic match for "Castel." What Castel apparently never did was verify that this name was free and clear before building a business around it. It wasn't. Back in 1998, a company that would become Li Daozhi's Panati Wine, based in Shanghai, filed to register a trademark, Cavesmaitre in English and 卡斯特 in Chinese, and the registration was approved in 2000. That's the same characters Castel had been using in the Chinese market, held by a company Castel apparently never checked for, or chose not to negotiate with, before building years of brand recognition on top of it.
It's worth understanding who was on the other side of this fight, because Li Daozhi wasn't a shell company set up purely to squat on a famous name and wait. He built Panati Wine into a real business around Cavesmaitre and 卡斯特, well enough that the mark eventually earned official recognition in China as a well-known trademark, a formal legal status that puts real teeth behind enforcement. By some accounts, Cavesmaitre became the fifth liquor-related brand to receive that designation in China, joining the company of Chivas, Remy Martin, Martell, and Hennessy, genuinely elite company for a business most wine drinkers outside China had never heard of. This wasn't a paper trademark sitting in a drawer waiting for a foreign company to blunder into it. It was an active, legally fortified brand that Castel had been unknowingly infringing for years.
Most trademark stories in this series involve a foreign brand belatedly discovering someone else registered their name and scrambling to respond. This one is a little different. It was Li Daozhi who filed suit against Castel, in 2009, arguing that Castel had been infringing his registered 卡斯特 trademark for years by using it on wine labels, marketing, and retail packaging without permission. The Intermediate People's Court in Wenzhou ruled in Li's favor. Castel appealed. The Higher People's Court of Zhejiang Province upheld the ruling on July 16, 2013, ordering Castel to pay the 33.73 million yuan in damages and, notably, to publish a formal apology in China Industry & Commerce News, a state-affiliated publication specifically focused on business and trademark matters.
What makes this case land differently than a typical squatting story is the direction of the harm. In most of the cases in this series, a foreign brand loses access to a name it wants to use going forward. Castel had already been using 卡斯特 for years, building real consumer recognition under a name it never actually owned, which meant every year of marketing success it built was also, unknowingly, building the value of a trademark someone else controlled. By the time the lawsuit landed, Castel wasn't just losing a naming fight, it was being billed retroactively for years of infringement it had no idea it was committing. There's a particular kind of financial pain in a damages figure that reflects your own successful marketing efforts being used to calculate how much you owe.
Chinese courts calculating trademark infringement damages typically look at factors like the infringer's profits from the unauthorized use, the trademark holder's own losses, and the scale and duration of the infringement. A figure this large, and this specific, close to 34 million yuan rather than a round settlement number, suggests the courts did real work tracing Castel's actual commercial use of 卡斯特 across its wine sales in China over the relevant years, rather than picking a symbolic penalty. It's a reminder that Chinese IP courts, contrary to a common Western assumption that trademark enforcement there favors domestic parties reflexively, were willing in this case to hold a major multinational to a serious, carefully calculated financial account, in favor of a domestic plaintiff, on the strength of documentation and registration dates alone.
For readers newer to Chinese IP law, it's worth explaining why Cavesmaitre's well-known trademark status mattered so much to the outcome. Ordinary trademark registration protects a name within its filed category. Well-known trademark status, a specific, harder-to-earn designation Chinese courts and regulators grant based on evidence of genuine market recognition, extends that protection much further, making it significantly harder for anyone, including a much larger multinational competitor, to argue their conflicting use should be allowed to stand. Li Daozhi didn't just have an early filing date on his side. By the time the lawsuit reached its conclusion, he had one of the strongest possible legal positions available under Chinese trademark law, and Castel was on the wrong side of nearly every factor a court would weigh.
Every case in this series eventually arrives at some version of the same advice, but Castel's story makes the stakes unusually concrete. This wasn't a brand that forgot to file. This was a major international company that spent roughly a decade actively using a Chinese name in the market without confirming who held the underlying registration, and the eventual bill came due with interest, in the form of over five million dollars in damages plus a public apology in a trade publication read by exactly the audience most likely to remember it. Before you print a single label with a Chinese name on it, run the trademark search first. It is a smaller and cheaper step than almost anything else in a China market entry plan, and Castel is the clearest possible example of what skipping it can eventually cost.