I come from a small wine-producing country of Moldova. It produces or produced anything from wine to classical champagne to port to cognacs to...
Now it's only wine that can be called wine (thankfully it's been around for longer than most civilizations). And for the rest they had to come up with their own rather awkward names. And now it doesn't matter if a Moldovan "divin" is superior to a French Cognac. Because branding.
I a definitely interested in trying Moldovan beverages now though!
See Generic Term/Trademark https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_trademark
I've yet to see a single person who thinks of the region when refering to a fizzy alcoholic name as "champagne".
> If the Moldovan spirits industry has a superior product, why can’t they call it a relevant name that protects the integrity of their creation?
You constructed your argument in a way that makes it sound that the moment something is called by a place name it becomes the superior product.
Like, there's nothing magical about the towns of Champagne or Cognac that makes the wine they produce different. It's all in the process and expertise used to produce the wine. If you brought the brewers and growers to another part of the world with the same soil and climate, and told them to make the same thing they make in Champagne and Cognac, they would produce identical[0] wine.
And the current regime of "terroir makes the trademark" leads to suitably absurd results. Like, if a Champagne producer wants to expand their operations, they can't, because there's only 75,000 acres of land you can legally make Champagne on. France has been trying to add new villages to Champagne's terroir since 2008 and the process still isn't done, even though the villages being added are literally just in between other Champagne villages. People still clutched their pearls about France diluting the brand purely by just allowing more of it to be made.
Ok, so maybe it's silly, but it shouldn't matter, because Champagne is a luxury product and I'm a [1]smelly American neoliberal that thinks you shouldn't be able to trademark a whole town. Fine. What about a staple food like rice? You see, India saw the EU PDO system and realized they could use it as a weapon to beat Pakistan with. So they're going to the EU and crying bloody murder about how poor Indian rice farmers are being crushed by evil Pakistani rice counterfeits[2]. Defining any sort of terroir here is a political statement not backed up by reality: both countries are either perfectly capable of making basmati rice, or we need to look at micro-climates and other things that would probably exclude a large portion of both countries' rice farms.
>If the Moldovan spirits industry has a superior product, why can’t they call it a relevant name that protects the integrity of their creation?
So, the thing is, often times there isn't really a generic equivalent name. We have "sparkling wine" for Champagne, but that seems to be rare. For example, I've no idea what you'd call non-terroir - but still otherwise well-made - Parmesan or Mozzarella cheese.
[0] As determined by a double-blind taste test with a suitably experienced sommelier.
[1] Two of the following words are true while the other one is trash. Can you spot the fake?
[2] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/6/7/india-pakistan-take-...
Then it can be judged on its merits and if it is as good as you say it is then selling it shouldn't be a problem.
It gets more muddy with cheese, lots of cheese named 'Gouda' isn't Gouda, traditionally Gouda (and Alkmaar) were the big cheese trading markets and the stamp 'Gouda' originally meant traded in Gouda, not produced in Gouda (which doesn't really make Cheese). But Edammer cheese really is made in Edam (or Volendam!). And 'Old Amsterdam' is just a tradename for factory produced Gouda like cheese which has nothing whatsoever to do with Amsterdam and isn't really all that old (artificial high speed ripening). Tourists love it though and pay ridiculous amounts of money for it and now you can get it in regular stores as well.
So food named after towns isn't always historically - or even at all - connected to the town. But in cases where that is so it makes good sense to respect that history.