The Year Ahead

There was a meeting at The Swan on Monday night, where the Fairtrade group planned for the year ahead.

But first, there was a bit of crowing!
YAY, US!!!!
The Fairtrade Wine Tasting that we organised for Fairtrade Fortnight was a resounding success! The only two criticisms we received were that the chaps from the Co-op, lovely though they were, were not wine experts, so could only really read out the tasting notes, and also it was sometimes hard to hear them (but that was possibly because everyone was having such a good time and chatting so loudly!)
We are looking into doing it again, possibly with Tanners, the wine merchants in Hereford, and fairly close to Christmas when people's minds will be on which wines they want to choose for the festivities.
We also managed to put another £200 into Shared Interest, which makes loans to Fairtrade businesses.

The group in Egypt which one of our committee is involved with have made some iPad bags and picture books for us to sell when we are doing stalls. They do a lot of patchwork with recycled cloth - the iPad bag is made from old ties. At the moment they are looking into the possibility of gaining Fairtrade accreditation for themselves, which would mean it would be possible for them to have loans from Shared Interest, and would make it easier for them to market their products (they do very good oven gloves - I have a pair). They have also been commissioned to make a Fairtrade banner for us.

On May 18th and 19th the Smallholders Fair will be held at the Royal Welsh Showground, and there will be a Fairtrade stand there, which may be staffed partly by members of Fairtrade Hay.

During Hay Festival, at the end of May, the Fairtrade notice board will be on display at Hay Church - in fact, it is there now, as a permanent feature, though it was in the Library for Fairtrade Fortnight.

On June 23rd, Jo Eliot and her husband Noel Kingsbury will be opening their garden again as part of the Open Gardens scheme. This was very successful last year (and they do have a very beautiful garden). There will also be teas and cake.

On 28th and 29th September there will be an event at Hayfield Community Gardens called Piece by Peace (or possibly that should be the other way round). The whole thing is based on the community pot firing sessions that happen in Timbuktu. People gather around kilns to fire their pots, share food and music and storytelling, and generally have a good time. Two Towns One World had the idea to do something similar in Hay, so there will be workshops ahead of time for people to go along and create a pot to be fired. They are even going to ask some of the authors who come to Hay Festival this year to get involved, and make a pot that can be auctioned for charity. The potters of Brook Street Pottery in Hay are involved in organising this - they actually have a kiln at the back of the shop, and if the door onto Chancery Lane is open, you can see it in use as you pass by.
They will be creating a song about Hay which will be sent to Timbutktu, and there will be a project with local schools looking at food from field to plate, showing children the seeds going into the ground, the flour being ground at Talgarth Mill locally, and the bread being baked in local baker Alex Gooch's ovens.
As part of the festivities, Fairtrade Hay will be running their Community Picnic, with co-operative games, an art walk, sticky sticks (make a model by pushing the sticks together), and face painting, so there will be masses of things to see and do.

We are even thinking ahead far enough to the next Christmas Fair - you have to book the Buttermarket this far in advance! This year it will be held on the 7th December.

Browsing the Web

While browsing through some blogs today, I came across Kindred of the Quiet Way. In her post on 23rd January, she writes a very good piece about the Cambodian ear-rings she bought from Eighteen Rabbit (online, but their shop is up at the Castle).
This reminded me that I hadn't added them to the side bar of this blog yet, so that oversight has now been rectified, and their online shop is available to be looked at.

Our First Wine Tasting Evening

It probably won't be our last!

There was a limit of 40 tickets because of the space we had available - Tomatito's Tapas Bar had kindly allowed us to use their back room, which is on three different levels! We had three tables on the top level, the microphone and information on the middle level, and our fourth group down below where all the comfy sofas are.
The new Fairtrade notice board got its first official outing, with lots of information about Fairtrade and the Hay group. On Thursday, the board will be moving to the Library, and after Fairtrade Fortnight, it will have a permanent home in St Mary's Church, with occasional visits to the other two churches in the local group, Llanigon and Capel-y-Ffin.

Everyone we approached to help was very generous. The Co-op weren't able to send a wine expert (all the wines came from the Co-op Fairtrade range), but they did send two lovely chaps along with all the information about the various wines and where they had come from. The Co-op sources its Fairtrade wines from South Africa, Chile and Argentina.
We started off with some very fine fizz, and followed that with four white wines. Each table was giving scores to the wines, and the favourite was worked out at the end of each session. I was one of the four wine waitresses (each in our Fairtrade aprons) so I didn't pay any attention to which wines were chosen, as I was busy serving.

We're very keen on promoting local produce in Hay as well as Fairtrade, and for the break in the middle of the evening we were lucky enough to have Kate, a local artisan bread maker and Charlie from Neal's Yard Creamery in nearby Dorstone.
Kate had baked four different breads for the evening, all of which were delicious. She supplies local restaurants and cafes, and also has a stall on the Thursday market, in the Buttermarket. I really liked her walnut and raisin loaf - and I don't even like walnuts! There was also one baked with fennel which was very nice.
Charlie has been making fine cheeses, mostly from goats' milk, for seventeen years in Dorstone. Most of the cheese he makes goes to the London market, but he also supplies local restaurants and cafes. In fact, while the red wines were being tasted in the second half of the evening, he disappeared round to the main tapas bar with a cheeseboard full of samples, to chat to a couple who had come in for a meal. They have just taken over the pub in Almeley, in Herefordshire, and were interested in serving some of Charlie's cheeses after they overheard him talking about them for the wine tasters.

At the end of the evening, everyone who had been helping managed to get a taste of some of the wine that was left over, and some of the breads and cheeses, before working out who all the different wine glasses belonged to, and returning an extra table and chairs to St John's chapel across the road. The Pinot Grigot was particularly fine.

Everybody seemed to have a good time, and everybody who was involved said they'd be happy to do it again. We also made a profit on the evening which we will be putting into Shared Interest, which gives loans to Fairtrade producers.

More Details of the Wine and Cheese Evening

Plans are really coming together for the Wine and Cheese Tasting evening for Fairtrade Fortnight. A wine buyer from the Co-operative will be coming to talk about the different wines, and the cheeses will be coming from Neal's Yard Creamery in Dorstone, with owner Charlie Westhead providing a Q&A session about the cheeses and cheesemaking. There will be ten different wines to try; red, white and sparkling, all Fairtrade, and four different cheeses. Any profits from the evening will be invested with Shared Interest, an ethical investment co-operative and the world's only 100% Fair Trade lender.

Fairtrade Wine and Cheese Evening

Tickets are now on sale at Eighteen Rabbit, up at Hay Castle, for the Fairtrade Fortnight Wine and Cheese Evening. Nine Fairtrade wines, a selection of local cheeses, with a short talk by the cheese maker and someone who knows about the wine, all at Tomatito's Tapas Bar, in the back room. Numbers are limited because of space, and tickets cost £10. The event starts at 7pm on the 26th February.

Fairtrade Christmas Fair

I'm a bit late with this one, but I only just thought to check out Hay TV to see what videos they are showing at the moment. There's a five minute video of the Fairtrade fair, with interviews with many of the stall holders, including Chris, who has taken the lion's share of organising the Fair up to now. Here's the link to the video (I can't manage workable links on this blog - I'm afraid it's a case of cut and paste): http://www.hayontv.com/musicvideo.php?vid=038f2a4f8

How the Christmas Fair Went

Normally, I'd be able to write a first hand report, complete with pictures, but I had a migraine on the morning of the fair, so couldn't do anything. Our nice shiny new display board stayed in my front room, but there was a Fairtrade table with mulled apple juice and cakes and leaflets - and all the apple juice was sold. Barbara and Reg set everything up, after James had delivered the table and all the rest of the equipment, and Barbara manned the stall until Julia took over in the afternoon. Jan organised the apple juice, cakes were made by Jo and Lesley and several other people. And of course, Chris organised all the stalls with all the wonderful Fairtrade goods. We couldn't manage without him! Jump4Timbuktu were there, of course, and so were Tools For Self Reliance, and a lot of the favourites from previous years, as well as new faces.