Centuries ago in France, small-hold farmers who wanted to produce wine would grow grapes on tiny plots of land, often the size of an average Aussie backyard. The problem they had was that they couldn’t afford to build their own vineyard and buy vats to make the wine. So they thought they would pool their grapes together and take them to a central winemaker.
So if I was a farmer, for my 100kg of grapes I might get back 100 bottles of wine, with the winemaker taking his cut. But that couldn’t work if I grew semillon and you grew shiraz grapes, so we got together and agreed on the varietal we were growing and on the quality that was acceptable. This gave rise to “appellation controllee”, literally the “control of the taste” - and you will see that term on the labels of good French wines today. It also explains why specific regions in France exclusively grow only one variety of grape - and partly why our Australian growers were able to have such success penetrating this established market.
I put this forward as a fun analogy of pooling raw materials to be processed in a centralised plant, along with the appropriate quality checks and balances. You see it isn’t really a new concept at all, is it?
Maybe the principles that the grape growers of France employed could also lead to the success of PIO! Go Pioneer.
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