Enfrentamiento de Piscos.

• Position: Liquor de pisco; Chile; Peru - TT: Pisco Face-off. - TA: pisco liquor; Chile; Peru

If Peruvians claim the pisco sour as their national drink, so too do their southern Chilean neighbors.

Indeed, Chile has stolen something of a march on Peru, exporting respectable quantities of pisco alongside its now well-established and internationally popular wines.

Chile laid claim to pisco as early as 1931. Several years later, to reinforce that claim, the government renamed an entire Chilean valley Pisco. It was not until almost 60 years later that Peruvian officials woke up to that fact and made their own counterclaims, which, for the past two or three years, they have been pressing through Peru's National Pisco Comission, established in 1997.

Luis Alonso García Muñoz, head of the trademark office at Indecopi, Peru's consumer protection and intellectual property watchdog, says that 1991 legislation means the name "pisco" can now be used within Peru only for the product of certain defined valleys that is made in a clearly specified manner.

"The grape, the soil and the method is what gives pisco its distinctive character," he says. "Just as champagne from the Champagne region of France is the real thing, so with pisco. [Defining pisco like this] identifies the product's personality, helps win market share and gives value added."

Peru has banned imports of any product called "pisco'--most of which have come from Chile. It has also persuaded its Andean Community partners--Ecuador, Bolivia...