Grape expectations for globalization

It's Anne's birthday. Happy birthday Anne.

In a follow-up to my post about trade policy and vermouth, I offer this:



Yes, it is actually called Grape Expectations.

We bought this bad boy today, for reasons which I can't explain, at the liquor shop. It's a two-liter bottle of what is described as "medium dry white", with an 11% alcohol content. And did I mention that the bottle is plastic? It's approximately 25% cheaper than our budget favorite, box wine.

As it turned out, the bargain basement is not a good place to buy wine. The smell of the wine, which wine connoisseurs call "the nose", was slightly winey, with overtones of diluted urine. As we are conozers rather than connoisseurs, we forged on ahead.

The taste itself was complex and varied, although not in any good way. At first, it was slightly sulfurous, with hints of wine. Then we tasted nothing at all. Then, a strong tang of plastic, and, finally, with a grimace, industrial alcohol. In short, it was the most vile wine I've ever experienced - although Anne said that she's had worse, which worries me.

Aside from the hideousness of the liquid itself, what's remarkable (to me at least) is what the bottle tells us about current trade policies.

The pre-1984 trade regime raised high barriers to foreign goods in an effort to promote local manufacturing and employment - i.e. to keep money circulating within national boundaries when possible. This led to some absurdities, naturally - manufacturing liqueurs and labels in Italy and assembling them in bottles in Auckland.

Since the liberalization of trade worldwide, which has taken place partially through multilateral World Trade Organization talks, and mainly through countries choosing to drop tariff barriers on their own (or being strong-armed into doing so by the International Monetary Fund), production value chains have proliferated across the world. In practical terms, this has made it much easier to design products in one country, manufacture the various parts in several other countries, and assemble the final good elsewhere. (This has been done by multinational corporations in an effort to lower the costs of production - often through labor arbitrage.)

This, in turn, produces its own forms of absurdities. Take, for example, these lines on the label of the bottle of "Grape Expectations":

WINE PRODUCT OF ARGENTINA
Bottled in Australia from
Imported Ingredients

In short, grapes were grown in Argentina, and presumably rejected for being too godawfully repulsive to go into Argentine wine. (Given the things I've drunk out of rectangular cardboard boxes in Argentina, this should have warned me off this beverage.) They were then turned into wine anyway, and shipped to Australia, where sulfur and preservatives were added (but why???). Finally, the product was put into plastic bottles, made out of oil that had come from somewhere else entirely, and the whole concoction was shipped to New Zealand.

Doesn't this sound like a really complicated way of making exceedingly fucking terrible wine? I suppose that this spirit is the inverted double of the decades-old vermouth I previously encountered. The promise of globalization (which I will define loosely as the lowering of trade barriers and the rise of global systems of production) was that it would make things cheaper. It never promised to make the world any less complex, or to make it make any more sense. Indeed, we've only replaced one type of non-sense for another.

Indeed, our only expectation going into the future is that things will get increasingly nonsensical if we examine them closely.