Raise a glass to ethical wine

(MorningStarOnline) - I am sure those of you who, like me, enjoy a drop and want to be ideologically sound in your choices have already worked this one out - they are wine-making co-operatives.

These splendid organisations allow small-scale growers to pool resources and benefit from economies of scale.

Small-scale growers often lack the resources to build wineries, to invest in technology or marketing. But get enough of them together and they can compete with the big boys. Every wine-growing region in the world has some co-operative presence and some are dominated by co-operatives.

The world's largest wine-producing region is the Spanish region of La Mancha. It was in the 1940s that the growers there started joining together to get better prices for their grapes.

Today almost 400,000 hectares of grapes are grown in the region, 70 per cent of which supply 130 co-ops.

Some people think that co-operatives only produce tank wine for blending or for distillation, but here Cooperativa Virgen de Las Vinas, the largest co-operative in Europe with 2,445 members, recently won the Bacchus de Oro Prize for its 2004 Tomillar Reserva, proving that even large co-ops can produce world-class wine