The Whiskey Reviewer A World of Whiskey, Poured Every Weekday
By Richard Thomas
A California lawsuit alleging that Maker’s Mark misled consumers by claiming its bourbon is “handmade, thereby violating the California’s False Advertising and Unfair Competition Act, was dismissed by Judge John A. Huston this week. Huston indicated that no reasonable person would interpret “handmade” as meaning literally by hand nor […] understand the term to mean no equipment or automated process was used to manufacture the whisky.”
The judge also added “plaintiffs cannot plausibly contend defendant intends to deceive consumers about the nature of its processes when its label clearly describes the process and points consumers to its website.”
A similar lawsuit against Maker’s Mark was dismissed in Florida in May. In that case, the ruling judge wrote in a similar vein to Huston, stating that no reasonable consumer could possibly think that hundreds of thousands of bottles were made, packaged and distributed entirely by human effort.
The two lawsuits against Maker’s Mark were part of a wave of court actions aimed at whiskey companies, coming in the wake of Daily Beast article on misleading marketing by whiskey bottlers that went viral last summer. The main subject of that article, Iowa bottler Templeton Rye, was targeted by at least three lawsuits, and recently settled out of court. The legal campaign then went astray, targeting companies like Maker’s Mark and Jim Beam.
