Message on a bottle wasn't phrased well.

• Author: Martin, Edward
• Position: Tar Heel Tattler

Water bottlers love to plaster their products with images of bubbling brooks and mountain meadows. But the competition in this roiling segment of the beverage industry -- Coca-Cola and Pepsi are investing billions -- can get as rough as whitewater.

Case in point -- Walter Church, a member of the General Assembly, and Walter Jr., who own Table Rock Springwater Co. in Burke County, which draws water from a well near a spring near Linville Gorge. Near enough, they say, for their water to be called spring water.

But a group of competitors wants the state to stop the Churches from labeling their product that way. Bill Miller, president of the North Carolina Spring Water Association, admits his 20 members have a stake in limiting competition, but he argues that if nature doesn't send water bubbling to the surface on its own, it's not spring water. "I believe in the dictionary definition," he says. And he does not want to see it watered down. Spring water sells better than plain bottled water.

In 1996, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration ruled that a bottler who drew water from a well could call its product "spring water" if the well shared the same underground source as a spring. The usual test: pump the well and see if the spring level drops. Four years later, the Churches and a partner bought Table Rock. The state, which enforces the FDA rule, had twice before refused it spring-water status because the prior owner hadn't performed the pump test, which costs about $12,000. Plus, state tests indicated that...