Wine

via beanscenemag.com

If there is one thing that surprised me most about our trip to Kelleris, it's that grapes really will grow anywhere.  When we think of vineyards, we picture the warmth and sun of California or southern France- never did I imagine that wine- good wine- could be made right here in Denmark.  At the same time though, grapes are picky.  The set-up we saw, with the meticulously spaced out plants, pruned to perfection, not a limb out of place, showed a far more labor intensive process than I had imagined.  And if I thought I didn't know much about the winemaking process, I just had to wait a few minutes to see how little I knew about the finished product.  Of the five wines we tasted, four of them tasted exactly the same to me.  Clearly, I still have a lot to learn.

Grape Vine
via leagueathletics.com

Wine was first brewed over 8,000 years ago in the Middle East, and quickly became a favorite worldwide.  In ancient Egypt, in 3000 BC, wine was widely adored and had both ritual and religious significance.  Ancient Greece, Rome, and China all too loved this drink, and devoted loads of time, energy, and mythology to it.  Wine was so well loved that it found its way into many religions; christianity sees wine as the blood of Christ, is blessed at Jewish ceremonies, and the Greeks added a god of wine and revelry, Dionysus, to their parthenon. Wine's popularity continued well into Medieval times, where it was drunk at nearly every meal by the merchant and noble classes.  During this period, wine was often watered down, and mixed with spices or honey to make it less alcoholic and more appetizing.

Today, wine is as popular as ever.  According to the wine institute, the US alone consumes nearly 900 million gallons of wine each year- and Americans are far from the most prolific drinkers of wine. Per capita, the French drink over nine times more wine than Americans.  The world wide wine industry is worth over 2.5 billion dollars.  Wine truly is a wonder drink.

Fair Trade

Fair trade, at it's core, is a way for those at the bottom of the supply chain to earn more money and a larger percentage of the proceeds from the sale of the final product.  With most products, those who grow or create the natural resource used to make the product are the poorest and least well payed in the whole process.  While coffee farmers in Ethiopia live in poverty, corporations like Starbucks can make billion of dollars in profits selling the final product.   Many consider this to be exploitation and unacceptable, so the fair trade movement was born.

via fairtrade.net

The system works like this: a farm  or other growing organization joins a fair trade cooperative, and has to operate according to the fair trade standards of sustainability and political standards.  The fair trade organization oversees these cooperatives and ensures they act accordingly.  Distributors of the product in other countries must pay a higher price for the goods, as well as for the right to use the fair trade logo on their packaging, but may sell the product for whatever price they like.  The system tries to ensure that underprivileged farmers are not taken advantage of, however the effectiveness of fair trade is hotly debated.

The biggest criticism against fair trade is that it simply does not help those it is designed to help.  Companies can sell fair trade products at very high mark ups, but there is no regulation on what percent of the extra revenue has to go to the farmers.  Often this leads to companies making a higher profit off fair trade goods, and the growers not seeing any of that benefit- the exact opposite of what the system hoped to achieve.  Another problem is that for the cooperatives to comply with fair trade regulations is very costly, and growing organizations may end up spending more money on this than they receive from fair trade.  Other growers who are not fair trade have problems with it as well.  Because the prices are fixed for fair trade products, they can not respond to market forces. Thus, when the supply of these goods outstrips the demand, prices should fall but they cannot.  Therefore, the non fair trade farms, who can respond to market forces, see their prices fall significantly, while the fair trade prices are untouched.