A small proposal

I haven't really written anything here in anger before, I might have written once or twice in boredom but never in anger. Now that changes. It takes a lot to make me really angry but today it happend and the topic is, of course, wine, or rather the lack off. As you might, or might not, know Syria pretends to produce something it likes to call wine (from now on referred to as "wine"). No one else in the world would ever label it that but they do. The quality of it is so bad that it's not even fitting to use it for carpet miscoloring. So it might come as a bit of a shock that they didn't start producing "wine" yeterday but that it has actually been going on for a while. Myself I'm of the opinion that if you've been doing something in a REALLY bad way for a long time you should probably change something. A first step for the local "wine"-producer could be to get someone to sample it before it's distributed but since they no longer carry out death penalties in this country I don't think that will happen.

I was discussing this matter with a Syrian today and he told me that the company is governmentally owned and that of course gave me lots of great ideas on how to improve things. The first thing to come to mind is that they should just sell the entire thing to someone who actually knows something about wineproduction or at the least to someone that has actually had a glass of wine in his/her life. Considering that other countries in the region produce quite nice wines I don't think the abyssmal quality of Syrian "wine" is because of raw materials so there should be someone out there that would be interested. The government makes a nice buck selling it all and let's someone else make all the new investments and then they can tax exports and local distribution to make another buck or two. This idea was appreciated but called unrealistic.

So I had another one: Bring someone over here to improve the production but keep the ownership with the government. You don't need to bring some expensive French guy, just ask someone that had a setting of fruit wine in their bathroom to take a look at production, it couldn't do any harm. Somethings you don't even need professional help for, like: getting some new barrels instead of using ones that earlier were used to store toxic waste and just because they added kerosene to the wine in Simpsons doesn't mean that you have to do it too. And if the point of selling this "wine" is to provide people with candlesticks then you might just want to stop making them have to pour out the "wine" first and just make some nice candlesticks instead. This way the government has to pay for investments but they can keep all the profit. I don't understand why this hasn't already been taken care of since I do believe that Syria could compete with Lebanese wine and make a rather nice profit from exports.

If I ever come back to making small proposals I'll do one on Syrian Tourism marketing, or lack off. That's almost as upsetting as the "wine" thing, not quite though as nothing ever upsets me more than a bad wine.

I will never ever ever even mention the thing they call "beer" here, just put it like this; they most probably use the water from the river whose name it goes by to make it...