Ask ten wine drinkers in China what 奔富 (bēn fù) means, and most of them will tell you the same thing: Penfolds, the Australian winery that made its famous Grange, and one of the most trusted foreign wine names on the mainland. What almost none of them know is that for the better part of two decades, the company that actually makes Penfolds wine did not fully control that name in China. Treasury Wine Estates has now fought this battle on two completely separate fronts, years apart, against two completely different opponents, and both times the fight came down to the same basic question: does a name belong to the company that built its reputation, or to whoever files the paperwork first?
Here's how the first front opened. 奔富 (bēn fù) is the widely used Chinese translation of "Penfolds," built from characters that suggest something like "racing toward wealth," a genuinely clever, auspicious-sounding choice for a luxury import. In 2009, an associate of a woman named Li Chen obtained a trademark registration for 奔富, years before Treasury Wine Estates got around to locking down the Chinese-character version of its own brand. By the time Treasury noticed, the mark was already someone else's legal property.
Treasury filed to cancel the registration in 2012, arguing Li Chen wasn't genuinely using the mark in commerce, just sitting on it. Beijing's People's Court initially agreed, finding that Li Chen couldn't prove real commercial use, and the Beijing High People's Court went further, stripping her of the registration entirely. That sounds like a clean win. It wasn't, not fully. The ruling didn't hand Treasury the trademark. It simply knocked the squatter's registration out and reopened 奔富 for anyone to file for again, Treasury included, with absolutely no guarantee they'd be the one to land it. Winning the fight to take the name away from somebody else turned out to be a completely different achievement from winning the right to own it themselves.
There's a reason 奔富 was worth squatting on in the first place, and it's a lesson in why naming matters as much as lawyering. Transliterations chosen purely for sound often land flat in Chinese, functional but forgettable. 奔富 does something more clever: it approximates the sound of "Penfolds" while also carrying real, positive meaning on its own, evoking speed and prosperity, exactly the kind of associations a premium import wants attached to its name. A weak, purely phonetic name rarely attracts squatters, there's no upside in owning something nobody wants. A genuinely good name attracts exactly the kind of attention Treasury eventually had to spend a decade fighting off, twice.
If that were the whole story, it would already be a solid case study in how slow and uncertain trademark cancellation can be, even when you win. But the Penfolds name kept generating trouble on an entirely separate track. Years later, counterfeiters in different parts of China began producing and distributing wine under names deliberately built to ride on 奔富's reputation: 奔富, plus close variants like 奔富尼澳 and an English-language knockoff, Penfunils. This wasn't a paperwork dispute over who filed first, it was straightforward counterfeiting, real bottles, real fake labels, real consumers being misled.
A winery in Huai'an and a distributor in Hangzhou ended up as defendants, and in 2020 the Nanjing Intermediate People's Court ruled decisively for Treasury Wine Estates, awarding roughly 1.2 million yuan in damages and ordering the infringing activity to stop. What makes this ruling genuinely interesting from a linguistics and law standpoint is that Treasury's official Chinese trademark registration was, again, still not fully secured at the time. The court sided with them anyway, recognizing 奔富 as a well-known unregistered trademark on the strength of its documented consumer recognition and continuous use going back to the 1990s. In 2025, China's Supreme People's Court included this ruling in its official reference case database, a formal signal that this reasoning now carries extra weight for future cases involving foreign brands without complete Chinese registration.
It's worth pausing on why the Huai'an and Hangzhou case matters beyond the courtroom. Counterfeit wine isn't a victimless paperwork problem the way an idle trademark registration can be. Someone buying a bottle labeled with a name deliberately built to look like 奔富 has no way of knowing what's actually inside it, what grapes, what region, what production standards, if any. The financial damages Treasury won, 1.2 million yuan, are a modest number set against a global wine business, small enough that you can tell the point of the lawsuit was never really about the money. It was about establishing, on the legal record, that this specific set of characters belongs to one specific company, so that the next Huai'an winery thinking about trying the same trick knows exactly what happened to the last one.
It's worth sitting with why one brand name generated two entirely separate legal sagas. The Li Chen dispute was about ownership of the registration itself, a classic first-to-file trademark squatting problem. The Huai'an and Hangzhou case was about counterfeiting, people manufacturing and selling goods designed to be mistaken for the real thing. These look similar on the surface, both involve unauthorized use of 奔富, but they sit on completely different legal footing. One is a fight over who gets to hold the paperwork. The other is a fight over who gets to sell a product under a trusted name at all, paperwork aside. Treasury had to win both kinds of fights, using different legal theories, in different courts, years apart, to protect the same four characters.
The 2025 Supreme People's Court reference case is the part of this story I find most useful for clients. It confirms that Chinese courts are increasingly willing to protect a foreign brand's Chinese name based on genuine, documented market recognition, even when the formal registration paperwork is incomplete or contested. That's a meaningfully more forgiving legal environment than existed when the Li Chen dispute first began in 2009. But "more forgiving" doesn't mean "safe to ignore." Treasury still had to spend years and real legal resources proving what its own customers already knew instinctively, that 奔富 meant Penfolds and nothing else. Waiting for the courts to eventually recognize obvious consumer reality is a strategy. It is not a good one.
If there's one lesson threading through both fronts of this fight, it's that the gap between "everyone already associates this name with us" and "we legally control this name" can run for years, cost real money, and require winning in front of multiple courts against multiple, unrelated opponents. Treasury Wine Estates eventually came out ahead on both fronts, but "eventually" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. File the Chinese-character version of your name early, monitor for both squatters and counterfeiters separately, because they are legally different problems requiring different fights, and don't assume strong brand recognition alone will protect you if somebody else's name ends up on the registration first.