Portfolio of Past Work
Wine And Culture In Nemea
A view of Nemea on a warm summer's day from one of the surrounding mountains. The plentiful vineyards stretching out across the valley display the centrality viticulture to this community.
A vineyard of Agiogitiko grapes gives way to a dramatic backdrop characteristic of the dramatic geography of Nemea. The geography of the region creates a microclimate which produces a unique and sought-after vintage.
I pose with my grandfather, a native Nemean who grew up tending Agiogitiko grapes and inspired me to pursue this project, in front of my presentation at the URECA symposium.
In the Spring of 2019, I was awarded a Summer Travel Grant to travel to my grandfather's hometown of Nemea, Greece. Aside from being renowned for a certain lion of Heraclean fame, the town is known primarily for its excellent viticultural tradition, for which it has been granted a protected designation of origin by the European Union. Local winemaking dates back millennia, to well before antiquity, and my family's history is entwined with the sought-after Agiorgitiko vines. To this day, my relatives own several fields where they cultivate grapes. After taking a fascinating cultural anthropology course my first semester at Wake, I was inspired to study how this age-old tradition had shaped how the people of Nemea lived and viewed themselves. I traveled to Nemea and stayed with my great Aunt for about a month while I conducted my anthropological research. Due to the small online presence of many Nemean winemakers, I arranged interviews once I had arrived. In the time I was there, I held fifteen formal interviews and countless informal ones and took notes from everyday interactions, ultimately discovering that winemaking has had and continues to have a transformational role in local culture, dominating the local economy for centuries and causing family life to align to the unique demands of winemaking, which are especially intensive and disruptive during the harvest season, when 14-16 hour workdays, 7 days a week are the norm for weeks at a time.
On interesting finding of my research was that the intensity of the harvest period was that dual-viticulturalist households with young children are relatively rare. The difficulty of balancing childcare and family life with the highly time sensitive nature of harvesting grapes during the short window in which flavor is optimal for producing premium quality wine is very difficult, and it often forces one parent to either quite entirely or seek a more flexible position which has more reasonable demands during peak season. Due to the relatively traditional nature of gender roles in rural Greek society, this often means that in families with children women in particular are incentivized to move into a different role within the business. A recurrent theme throughout the trip was that many of "hospitality and management" employees--individuals whose primary role in the operation peripheral to wine making, such as giving winery tours, conducting outreach, managing commercial wine sales, and more--were women who have their degrees in viticulture but confessed that upon starting a family, necessity compelled them to move into a position with more scheduling stability to better accommodate family obligations.
Below, I have linked my full report on my findings from this project, as well as anonymized interview transcripts from many of the interviews. Note that some Greek has been corrupted somewhat by file transfers over the years, so some portions of the transcripts written in Greek may be difficult to decipher.