In 1997, a boy in poverty-stricken Sierra Leone was walking along a dirt path in his village when he noticed a yam growing beside the road. A yam meant dinner, so he reached down and pulled it up. With it came a diamond, a huge diamond. This is possible in Sierra Leone; diamonds are the wealth and the curse of the country. He took the diamond to the local trader, who held back his astonishment and put the boy in his car. He then drove to Freetown and let the boy pick out a bicycle, any one he wanted. Shortly thereafter he took the diamond to Brussels and sold it for hundreds of thousands of dollars – thus did a middleman grab an outsized share of the profits of the find.
This painting, “Women Panning for Diamonds,” is by the noted Sierra Leonean painter, Hassan Bangurah, who was a friend of mine.
It was Sunday, the hottest day of the year so far, and Angela and I had decided to visit the North Carolina State Farmers Market in Raleigh. It being still May, the selection of vegetables was as yet limited. There were some good looking tomatoes and some tempting bibb lettuce, but the only edible I could not resist were some spectacular strawberries, huge, firm and dark red. Later, I would fix them with my favorite fruit sauce, half-melted vanilla ice cream.
The word yummy has no better illustration.
The point of a farmers market is, of course, that one buys the produce directly from the farmers themselves, without the superimposition of a supermarket or other middleman. The presumption is that the fruits and veggies will be fresher and cheaper than otherwise. And indeed, it seemed to be generally true on that hot Sunday.
At right, the North Carolina Raleigh Farmers Market on a busy day.
My father was a dairy farmer, but he was also a middleman. In the 1950’s. all the farms in our little town in Maine sold their milk to the huge Hood Dairy in Boston, which sent a truck around to pick up the 10-gallon milk cans which in turn somehow made it from there to Boston for processing. Dad, though, learned that he could get a better price by selling his milk to the local dairy in Skowhegan, the county seat, a mere 20 miles away. The problem was that he would have to transport the cans himself, and there went the financial advantage.
But this man was the very source of half of my smarts, and therefore a very clever person, and he reasoned that if he could, while he was at the dairy, pick up packaged milk, cream, cottage cheese and other dairy products and distribute them to the little grocery stores, school cafeterias and soft ice cream vendors in the towns between our farm and Skowhegan, he could get things back to the plus side, and then some.
Thus, he became a middleman. So you see, I have nothing inherently against middlemen in general.
At the left, a rare photo, circa 1957, of our farm in Harmony, Maine. The shed between the house and the barn (appropriately in the “middle” of the building) is where the wholesale milk operation was located.
Now, this article is, of course, about grapes. So I had best get to that particular crop.
As I'm sure you know, most grapes grown in the world are turned into wine, just as most raw milk is turned into the pasteurized, homogenized product you buy in the store (not to mention butter, cheese, etc. – and vanilla ice cream for me to half-melt and slather on my strawberries.)
You may also have noticed that the labels on many bottles of wine proudly claim that the contents are “estate bottled,” and wondered what that meant. Well, it means simply that the vineyard owner has built a wine-bottling facility right there on his property, rather than ship his crop somewhere else, to be combined with that of other growers and labelled, one presumes correctly, as Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay or whatever.
The estate bottler has eliminated one of the middlemen.*
Here at Union Grove Farm, our grapes are not made into wine, estate bottled or otherwise. They are made into fabulous, nutritious, delicious SuperHero brand snacks. And they are freeze dried, indeed Estate Freeze Dried. (See the full story in my recent Little House column here.)
Thus has Union Grove Farm invented not only its product, but the very name of the genre. From no other source can you obtain freeze dried muscadine grapes, prototypes of which have been acclaimed by all test audiences, and which are at this moment growing on the vine, and will be available to you and the general public later this very year.
I would be remiss too, if I did not mention that the Union Grove Vineyard is the only certified Teir 5 RegenerativeTM vineyard anywhere. That’s a big deal, folks. It tells you not only where, but how the grapes are grown.
It is also possible for you to come to the “estate”, meaning Union Grove Farm in Hillsborough, North Carolina, yourself, and watch the grapes ripen and all the wonderful things that are part of the process. I endorse the idea unreservedly. Begin your vineyard tour here
*No doubt there are mddlewomen, too, but please don’t demand that I change the nomenclature. To what?, I ask. And why?
