Fermented landscapes. When you have a glass of wine, if you have a glass of wine, do you think about where the wine came from?

What about the grapes or the land that they were grown on?

land that they were grown on? Typically we tend to think about the product, the glass of wine we're drinking.

But behind the glass are all kinds of decisions, communications, and processes that go into making that glass of wine.

All influenced by the desire to create a wine that consumers deem valuable.

These decisions are all part of the fermented landscape.

Join us today as we learn more about fermented landscapes and diving into your research.

Glass first. Welcome to Research Outside of the Box, a podcast for unconventional, unique, and out-of-the-box research happening at Texas State and the innovative research approaches faculty use along the way.

I'm your host, Kamarie Carter, training specialist for faculty development.

And today in the studio we have with us Dr. Colleen Myles, associate professor in the Department of Geography.

Thank you for joining us today, Colleen. Yes, thank you for the invitation. Yeah, so I always like to ask folks to kind of talk a little bit about themselves, would you mind? Yeah, so I'm Colleen Myles. I'm in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies. We added on to our departmental name recently, so we have a longer title.

And I've been here for 10 years this August, which is a bit crazy to me. Congratulations. Yes, happy anniversary. Yeah, I think I get a little pin or something. I don't know. We'll see. That's great. Did you get a pin? Can't beat it. And so I am a researcher here, a teacher, a person who does all kinds of things on campus.

And I focus my teaching on environmental management, environmental interpretation, research design, qualitative methods, political ecology, all kinds of stuff like that.

A lot of things. A lot of things. And then for research, I also focus on I have quite a few things that I'm doing.

My latest project is related to wine and tastemaking and placemaking.

But the project that led into that, I call Fermented Landscapes.

I have an edited book out of that same title. And that was a project I was working on for a number of years prior to starting the project I'm doing now.

But related to that Fermented Landscapes research, I have looked at wine and beer and cider and other kinds of spirits, all specifically in terms of how they relate to landscape change, cultural landscapes, and environmental landscapes, and how they're shifting over time.

That stems from my dissertation research actually before that. So there is a nice through line between all of this and how you look for it.

My dissertation research was not about wine or beer, but was about rural perceptions, or perceptions of rural character, let's say, and people's land use choices and decisions around that.

And so the thing that I did, the research that I did as a PhD student was a comparative case study of three different cases in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California, which is on the east side of the state of California.

And one was a ranch that had been a ranch since the Gold Rush era in California. And one was a ranch that had become a winery and event center.

And another was a ranch that had become a golf course.

And so I looked at people's varying perspectives of those three cases of land use change or in the case of the first one, non-change.

But of course, in order for something to stay the same for that long, there are many decisions that are made to keep it in place. So in any case, I did this comparative study and it was really interesting to me that the winery was seen as a positive land use change and the golf course was perceived negatively.

Interesting. So it planted this seed for me that there's something particular going on around fermentation driven development or landscape change. And so when I came to Texas State, following my PhD, you have to spool up kind of quickly to find some new research projects and get yourself going when you're on the tenure track. And so I took that kind of nugget to use a gold rush metaphor from the dissertation and thought, well, let me see what I can do and go back to this year, Nevada. I replied for a research enhancement grant, which we have at Texas State. So that was really helpful to me. I went back for the summer and did some very intensive fieldwork.

I did maybe 60 interviews in about two weeks. Maybe it was three weeks, but it was, each interview was an hour, hour and a half long. So I was really intensively, really intensively working, driving all around the countryside. It was great though. And then I came back and I wrote up some various things, including coming up with this notion of fermented landscapes, which became my kind of big project and tenure. And Texas is a really good location for that, especially the hill country, because we have a lot of wineries in this area, right? Absolutely. Absolutely.

And so if any listeners have been to Fredericksburg or even approached Fredericksburg, you can't help but notice the proliferation of wineries there. Absolutely. It's everywhere. And tasting rooms. And so what I look at, well, I look at a lot of things, but one of the things I'm looking at is that, you know, so there's vineyards where grapes are grown and there's wineries where wine is made and there are tasting rooms where people consume wine.

And in the sort of traditional wine landscape, all of those things happen in one place. And Texas is a special case because many of the grapes are grown in the northern part of the state, up in the High Plains area. But much of the wine, well, there's wine produced up there as well, but there's also a lot of wine production in the hill country. And there are... It's kind of a hub of most of it. There are grapes grown in the hill country as well, but the great majority of them are grown in the northern part of the state. So there's this kind of spatial mismatch between where the grapes are grown and where the wine is produced. And that's partly in due to the fact that there's many more people that are proximate to the hill country area and it's much more of a tourist destination in itself.

And so wine can leverage people that are interested in the wine industry or trying to promote a wine-based business have much more capacity to do that in the hill country area versus the High Plains. That makes sense. So that's one element of that. And so the fermented landscapes research has to do with wine at its core, as you can see this. But the point of fermented landscapes is to consider how landscapes are changing, cultural and environmental landscapes are changing through processes of fermentation. And I use the word fermentation both in that kind of literal, generative, change agents, agitating change in a particular context, as well as a sort of metaphorical fermentation of the landscape, foment of change situation. Yeah. Yeah. Change agent, like you were saying, I really like that term. You had used the phrase taste making and place, what was it? Taste making and placemaking. Can you elaborate on what those mean? Yeah, sure.

So if you have heard any people talk about wine for any significant amount of time, they might say the word terroir.

This is a concept that is long standing in the field of wine studies, various kinds of studies of wine, wine geography, wine economics, et cetera, environmental studies.

And so the idea of terroir is that place, but more specifically kind of physical environmental characteristics, geology, soil, water availability, climate, slope, aspect, you know, how much sun a particular plot gets.

All of those things influence how the grapes grow and thus how the wine tastes in the end. So this is a concept that's very well established in wine that like physical environmental features, and then also cultural characteristics in terms of what wine making processes might be used to vent the wine.

All that's called terroir in one big lump sum.

Okay. So that concept is well established. It's not totally unproblematic. You know, scholars like to pick apart things in a variety of ways. That's what we do, curious minds.

Right, right. But in general, I would say that's a pretty well established and well accepted concept.

So what I've been doing is trying to sort of turn that on its head, coming to it from that fermented landscapes perspective, that change is happening due to fermentation or trying to understand if change is happening due to these processes of fermentation. And so I've been thinking about how taste makes place.

So if you can speculate that a given landscape looks the way that it looks or functions in the way that it functions due to these different kinds of factors and actors across it, again, think of Fredericksburg or the area between Austin and Fredericksburg, that 290 corridor there. If you can speculate that there's something happening there based on what industry is prominent, which right now is wine, then you might say that taste, aka wine and wine industries are shaping that place.

Not just that that place is shaping the taste of the wine, for example. They play into each other.

Right. So the way I've kind of different people or actors are coming in and shaping what we see as valuable in terms of taste, you know, taste has a number of connotations, gustatory taste, like the physical sensations of taste, as well as the cultural connotations of taste, like you might say, aesthetic taste or what we see as good versus bad wine or whatever.

These are notions of taste. So there are people that are taste makers that are creating and helping to curate our visions of taste.

And so what I've been trying to look at and explore is how those actors are shaping the way that landscapes become.

That is so cool. Yeah. So it's so it's like it's not rejecting that notion that place makes taste, but it's accepting that there's a iterative.

Yeah. It's reciprocal. Yeah. Dynamic kind of relationship between the two of them. Yeah.

Yeah. Oh, that's really interesting. So for folks who aren't in this field or who maybe aren't super familiar with this aspect of the research that you're doing, what makes this research out of the box or different?

of the box or different? Yeah. So the approach I've been taking, I was trained in qualitative methods as a graduate student and in participatory action research in particular.

That was my focus when I was coming up as a scholar.

And the research I did was I aimed to have it be community based, have it be responsive to communities, not be extractive.

There's this notion of research where the scholar comes in and gets what they want from the community and leaves and takes something with them, but doesn't leave anything behind. And so I was very much nurtured as a scholar to think that we should be more respectful and responsive to communities than that. And so that our research should be more aligned with maybe community interests or to make sure that at least we weren't taking things and not leaving anything for them.

So that community-based mindset or applied research is another way of thinking about it. The geography department here at Texas State has a long history of applied research. So I fit very nicely into that mold.

And so in any case, all that training I received, I was trained in ethnographic methods, which is something you might have heard of from anthropology, but also many other fields and subfields use it, including geography. And so that notion is that you go in and sort of embed yourself with a community to try to understand phenomenon from the perspective of that community rather than understanding it as an outsider, or at least to gain some insider insights, even if you can never fully... As much as possible. Right. Even if you can never fully understand it from that insider view, you try to understand it from the perspective of the people that it's relevant to. So in any case, I've come into this study of wine thinking, I want to understand tastemakers and tastemaking with some of those insider insights.

I did not grow up drinking wine.

I come from a sort of lower income area and not that I didn't ever see wine.

It just wasn't like a part of... It just wasn't a part of your life. Yeah, it wasn't a part of my household or anything like that. So it's not like I have my own kind of ingrown beliefs about wine.

my own kind of ingrown beliefs about wine. So I thought, well, this is kind of good, actually. I can come at it from a pretty fresh perspective. And then as I mentioned in my dissertation research, I was engaging with people that were related to wine growing and wine making, but it was sort of on the outside of the project rather than being at the core of it. So in any case, when I decided to do this tastemaking as placemaking project, I thought, you know, I want to understand tastemaking from the inside. How can I do that? And so what I thought was, how about I go and I watch tastemakers in training? How about I go observe what that is like?

observe what that is like? And I started tuning into sessions called, for example, tasting with master sommeliers, or I sat in on a six month preparation course for a particular wine certification program.

There's a number of wine certification organizations nationally and globally. So, you know, there's many opportunities for this. If you look for them, there's one called the wine spirit education trust W set.

There's one called the society for wine educators.

There's the court of master sommeliers, etc.

A lot of choices. There's a lot of choices. So I sat in, I started by I was going on developmental leave. So thankfully, I was able to take a semester of I'm going to cook up my next big project here on this. And so I was like, what do I want to do? So I sat down and engaged in this virtual six month course, where every week we were in seminar together, we were doing readings, they were taste along activities with various wines.

And it was really interesting to me to hear where people were coming from, why they wanted to get this kind of certification, what they were particularly learning, you know, what elements the instructor thought was important to share or to highlight.

So I just kind of took it from a totally fresh worldview blank slate, what's happening here.

And then that led me, of course, to many different avenues of, you know, networks and things I should follow up with, or, you know, signing on for a different class or something like that. So you essentially, in a lot of ways, became the person that you were researching. Yeah, so so I've now gained some certifications of my own.

So I have, I'm a certified specialist of wine CSW.

I also have the W set the wine spirit education trust level one, which is their most entry level, which I would say people who are serious wine drinkers can probably study just a tiny bit and pass that one. So that's kind of the lower level. But once I passed that exam, I called myself a certified wino TM.

So and then I also have, because I've been so focused or so interested in Texas, let's say there's also a certification called a specialist of Texas wine. And there's two levels for that. So I've done both of those as well. So yes, to your point, like I've sort of become a sommelier a bit myself.

That's sort of a strange term, because if you call yourself a sommelier, it's because you often work in the wine industry. And so since I'm an academic at work at Texas State, it's like I'm not quite I'm like an amateur sommelier.

But the term I came up with for myself recently was a scholar Psalm.

So sort of like a mix of the two. So yeah, so I mean, for better or for worse, I do feel a bit like I've entered into that community.

But in a sense, as an, you know, participatory research project, that's actually great, because I'm not just observing, I'm participating in that process as well. You're doing it, you're doing a deep dive into the perspectives of the people that you're looking into. And I'm sure that that lends for some really good insight into not only what you're researching, but also maybe the way that you're researching as well. And absolutely.

And since my goal as a, you know, community based researcher is to try to do some good in the community that I'm in, and not just, you know, write papers about it and take out what I want.

It's what I've really been trying to do is cultivate those networks and those connections. You know, I know people in the industry here. And when, you know, they're like, Oh, this, you know, it would be great if we had somebody who could come talk about this, or does anyone know anyone who can do that, like they're starting to recognize that I might be a resource. And that is like really gratifying. When I get an email from somebody that says, Oh, do you know anybody who does geology? Or do you know anything about how to put together a sustainability model for wine or whatever? And I'm like, you're on your path to becoming a representative. And I was like, now I can act as a liaison for you and for Texas state and the department. That's amazing. And given the stature of wine in Texas, people who are outside of Texas hear the phrase Texas wine, and they are confused.

and they are confused. They're like mad about it. They're like, you know, they're like, what even is that?

what even is that? What are you joking? But but wine is serious business in Texas. Oh, it is. The recent most recent report about it was it's a $20 billion industry in Texas.

And there are a lot of people that are trying very hard to make wine here high quality and worthwhile and launch Texas wine onto the international stage.

stage. And importantly, I think the indicator that shows it's working is that there are many outside investors coming into this state, which gets back to the landscape issues, right?

this state, which gets back to the landscape issues, right? So why does Hill Country, why does that Fredericksburg to Austin corridor look the way it looks? Because now there are many companies that can come in and set up shop there as a tasting room. And people will get business. People will go there and drink wine. So people that want to talk about Texas terroir, to use that to use that phrase again, they are interested in making sure that Texas wine has an identity, that Texas wine has a place at the table in and of itself, like grapes from Texas wine made in Texas consumed by Texans or whoever will drink it. Some of these outside entities, the wine industry has gotten so developed and so big globally that you can get grapes or even grape juice from anywhere basically, and then turn it into wine in any particular location.

And if there aren't rules about it, you can call it Texas wine, say if it's grapes from California or even juice from California, but it was vented in Texas.

And that was kind of a big hullabaloo in the wine community a couple of years ago, because there were certain, you know, interests in this state that said we don't want to have like fake Texas wine, we want to have real Texas wine. So Texas is among only three states in the United States that has a 100% Texas grape rule on the books. Way to go, Texas. Yeah.

So the point is just there's a variety of factors and dynamics that are at play that if you just sort of pick up a bottle of wine off the shelf and it says Texas on it, you know, if you if you're not, if you don't know what you're looking for, you might be getting a veneer of one kind of thing, but actually getting something else. And so the research that I've been doing is this just like you said, a deep dive trying to understand what's in the bottle, where it came from, who's selling the bottle, who's buying the bottle.

And then, you know, the political ecology side of this, I don't know if you know what political ecology is, but this is the kind of power and people and how all those things are interrelated together.

And so there's been a kind of multi species turn in geography of late, where people are thinking about the more than human or non human elements of our world and how much attention and traction we're giving them and in terms of explanatory power.

And so another element of this is me thinking about the grapes, themselves, the vines, the land that they're on, all the kind of environmental components of that and how that shapes what like humans decide what vines to put on the ground, but then those vines themselves like either flourish or don't write in that matters in the end of things. And in Texas, the growing conditions here are tough.

It's a it's a rugged environment for growing grapes. I imagine I know very little about growing grapes. But I mean, I grew up in West Texas in the Permian Basin area.

in the Permian Basin area. And I do not remember seeing any vineyards, any wineries, anything like that. And so it seems like a harsh environment. But like you said, they do grow them mostly North Texas, correct?

Texas, correct? Yeah. And the there are the processes for or let's say the equipment and the technology and the knowledge around growing grapes has grown, you know, exponentially like UC Davis, for example, and other viticulture and eonology centers have an even opposite Texas, Texas Tech have done a ton of research a and m about how to best grow grapes in various environments.

And so there's been innovation in terms of the actual production that's allowed grapes to be grown in different places. And also importantly, the grape turns into wine, not just like some people think, Oh, well, wine is just grapes. And in some sense, it is just grapes, but there are a number of intervention points that humans and microbes have in that process that turns the grape into wine.

And so in some places, like quote unquote, old world wine, that's kind of like Europe, European wine, France, Spain, Italy, that kind of stuff.

And this is would be considered a new world wine location, the United States or Australia, or New Zealand, or South Africa.

or South Africa. There are different rules in place about what, what, like, frankly, what counts as wine and what counts as fine wine, and how much intervention you're allowed to do. So I will say Texas wine grape growing and wine production is pretty interventionist, but because of the environmental factors, they basically need to be more interventionist in order to get the grapes to grow and then to come out with a tasty product. And that's I'm not knocking that I'm just saying, that's just what's needed. Yeah, that's sort of, you know, it is what it is, as they like to say, they, they, they, but if you get, you know, like, if you do, like I've done and dive yourself into this sort of like Somalia community, there are people that will be like, well, if you're doing this to the grapes, while they're on the vine, or if you're doing this to the juice, while it's fermenting, or whatever, like you're, you know, you're cheating, or you're, you know, augmenting, or you're whatever, and that's not just Texas, that can be anywhere, right? But so people can get very particular, particular, and also judgmental, maybe, maybe judgmental is the right word. And so I've just been trying to listen and learn, like, what, what are the things that people get judgmental about? Or what are the things people get particular picky about?

get particular picky about? And what do those, what do those judgments mean? You know, if we're going to talk about taste, like I said, these multiple layers and connotations of taste, if you are the person who conveys information to the consumer, if you're the person who knows about wine, and it's picking out the wine to put on the wine list at the restaurant, that's what a Somalia does, or if you're the person who works for the distribution company that imports certain wines, or doesn't import certain wines, and thus those are the wines that get distributed to various retail stores, you're making decisions about what wine is available, and what wine gets consumed, and what wine wine is valued.

And so what are those driving value judgments that, that are, you know, leading you to certain decisions? Dr.

Myles had me and a few interested parties participate in what she calls a didactic tasting.

Essentially, we tasted different kinds of wines as one would in a different way.

So I'm doing this ethnography of tastemakers, I like to call it. So I am going around and embedding myself to understand how tastemakers learn what they know, and how they share what they know, and how they do their work. And you might be wondering what a tastemaker is, and you'll have to read my book. No, I can tell you what I think a tastemaker is. It's somebody who is shaping conceptions of taste, like basically what we physically, our physical, what is the word, gustatory taste, our aesthetic sense of taste, that word is used in a lot of different ways, which is why I'm really interested in it. There's a lot of layers to it, but specifically a tastemaker in my conception is somebody who shapes the way that people perceive and consume different products.

So I've received a couple of certifications through this process of basically observing sommeliers.

I've focused mostly on sommeliers at this point. This research could be done on a variety of products, but particularly right now, I'm focusing online due to a variety of things.

And so I've been observing and participating, doing participant observation in a variety of sommelier spaces.

And through that, going through educational courses along with people who are trying to become sommeliers and tastemakers, as I'm calling them. And by doing that, I myself have received some certifications. And so you're going to get kind of the demonstration of what a sommelier would do in their work if they were organizing this for a group of people. And with my commentary as a sort of scholar-som, a scholar-sommelier is my sort of new phrase for the identity that I'm crafting here.

And so I feel like if I come here, like my husband, for example, like I give him a different kind of line, but I'm like, oh, try this one, try this one. He's like, it tastes like wine. And I'm like, I know it tastes like wine.

What about it? You know, so I know that I have a more finer palate than he does in terms of discerning tastes.

The challenge for me is translating towards what differences I'm tasting into words to convey information to communicate that taste. That's a big part of your experience. Absolutely.

So while I'm saying a tastemaker, this is somebody who not only can, you know, you've maybe heard of a super taster, somebody who has a very refined sort of palate that can taste quite big differences between various things that other people might just be like, oh, whatever. It's like tastes like cheese or something. But they're like, oh, no, this one's much more nutty or this one's much more whatever. But the huge leap that a real, you know, trained expert makes is being able to describe those things. So I feel like I'm like, got my hands tied, you know, one hand tied behind my back in these spaces, because I know that I can taste differences between wine. Like I said, some of these events I go to, they'll give you a hundred different wines to taste. And I might be able to taste differences between them, but describing those differences is really crucial.

And so if you've heard of a master sommelier, there's a number of certification, you know, agencies and organizations, but one of the more famous ones is court of master sommeliers.

And to achieve a master sommelier status, you have to taste five wines.

And I think it's like six minutes or something like that and do a detailed assessment like this.

And then it's blind. You have to be able to tell them where the wine came from, what year it was, you know, all this kind of stuff, like really specific information and also describe the wine accurately, blind without knowing anything about it by looking at it. And so for me that when I listened to master sommeliers talk, I'm just like, they have just stuffed their brains full of words and associations.

They will tell you, I sat through this 10 session masters tasting with master sommelier session. It was fascinating. They were just like, I would, when I was training for my exam, and they might take this exam a couple times, because it's like really hard. Like I would just go to the market and go into the fruit section and just like just go and smell everything.

I would go into a spice store and like just smell everything I could smell. And I would take notes about what all of these things smelled like.

And then it helped me to build my vocabulary and my associations when I was tasting and smelling wine so that I could fill in what the wine tastes like and importantly, convey that information, communicate that information to the consumer or to the person trying to educate. So anyway, to that point. So I'm curious to know what problems did you run into during your research, which I'm sure you did, because we all do.

But what problems did you run into? And how did you have to think differently about the project to overcome that obstacle? Sure, that's interesting.

I will say, so I professional development leave in spring of 21 is when I was sort of launching my next big thing, which turned out to be this taste making as place making, or what I'm now also calling fermenting sustainability. That's sort of what it's grown into, thinking about how fermentation not only drives landscape change, but how we can be purposeful or deliberate about that and approach sustainability goals. In any case, I started that in spring of 21 before I knew to call it any of that.

And I wanted to sit in on that course that I mentioned, that training program for a particular certification.

certification. And when I mentioned, you know, I approached the organization was like, Oh, can I participate in your program?

And, you know, we were talking about that inside or outside or there was a bit, I mean, people might be like, Oh, come on, like you're not trying to like break into some, you know what I mean? Like the community that you're that, that you're, that you're trying to be a part of is like a super elitist, whatever, like, how would it be challenging to approach those people?

those people? But it is an insular space. You know, people are a bit territorial.

Well, you know, funny enough, because it's about, it's about territory.

But people can be territorial. And this is an area that people work hard.

It costs a lot of money to do these different certifications, protective, protective of it, you know, the, the knowledge there, there is some kind of gatekeeping, I would say.

And when I first wanted to get into it, I said, I was being honest, and I just was like, I'm interested in doing this as a scholar who's trying to understand environmental and social processes.

environmental and social processes. And I got a little bit of pushback, like, why are you trying to do this? And it was a little bit like, do you have an ulterior motive or something? Are you trying to like do some kind of expose about fine wine?

wine? And just prior to that, there had been some tensions, let's say, in the wine industry, and in many different industries, honestly, about diversity issues and sort of gender discrimination and things like that. And there had been a couple of kind of blowout instances where women had come forward and said that there was inappropriate hierarchical behavior going on.

And so I think that maybe people were a little worried that I was like, you know, coming in saying I wanted to just learn about how to be a tastemaker and worried that I was trying to uncover some because there's a history there. Yeah, right.

But thankfully, you know, I was able to, you know, convince them that no, I'm really just honestly trying to understand. Yeah, how did you have to approach that? Because they're kind of stakeholders in and of themselves are the people you're working with and researching ultimately.

How did you build that connection and, and maybe some level of trust with them? Yeah, so I mean, I what I ideally wanted to do was, you know, even send out maybe a survey or get a list of participants and, you know, maybe do some interviews or something like this. But basically, I was stonewalled. They were like, you can participate in the class, but we're not going to give you like that additional information.

And I was like, that's fine. You know, you know, because this was just the first organization I had gone to, you know, and I said, that's fine. I'm just getting started, you know.

And so I just basically went into it more like, okay, I'm just going to try to really be more like a fly on the wall and not be too intrusive, because I don't want to, you know, cause any ripples or rock the boat or whatever. And it and, you know, as it's turned out, as I've become more, you know, integrated into that community, like I said, you know, this scholar Psalm identity that I'm cultivating, I do feel like I'm a part of that community, at least to a degree now. So if I want to approach people, I feel like I can approach people either from my academic point of view or from that more kind of professional wine expert kind of point of view.

So really joining the community and playing a piece into that community. Right. So I can say, you know, I'm coming at this from, you know, and I never obscure that to anybody. I'm always very upfront about, you know, this is my profession as a academic, but also like my research has taken me in this direction that I also am now, you know, kind of a stakeholder in wine myself, you know. And so I feel like I just had to kind of own the fact that I was an outsider.

I had to kind of be like, it might be, it might be easy to be like, well, this is a sort of studying up or this is an elite organization.

And so there's no, you don't have the same challenges as if you're going into a marginalized community. And a hundred percent that's true, but I think it presents like different challenges being somebody going into that kind of like protective space.

You know, a marginalized community is going to be protective of itself for, for a variety of reasons.

And this community also a community of privilege, you might say.

And so what are the, what are the different dynamics that you need to be aware of? So that's one. And another huge one, I would say is the cost actually. So I've been, you know, writing, trying to write grants and all this, and I have not been super successful, sadly, despite my efforts. And so I have to self-finance some of this stuff. And you know, people might be like, oh, well, well, you have to like pay to go to a wine conference, you know. But I'm sure, I don't know, maybe that sounds expensive. Very, very expensive. Like this one that I've been going to, this will be my third or fourth time it happens at the end of August that I'm going to it. And the registration fee itself is about $700.

registration fee itself is about $700. And then of course, you have to get there and stay somewhere and whatever. And it's completely out of your own pocket for your research. Right. And so then it's like, you know, how much am I willing to pay for my own research?

And do you feel like it's hard, and you don't have to answer this if you don't want to, but do you feel like it's hard to get grant money because of the subject itself?

grant money because of the subject itself? Yeah, I'm not sure, you know, it's hard. I can speculate why I'm not being as successful as I would like.

I'm also sort of an abridging, you know, so I'm a social scientist, I'm a geographer. But I also think of this as sort of humanities adjacent work. Yeah, there's a crossover I see there too. Yeah, like an environmental humanities sort of project.

And so it's this kind of disciplinary, cross disciplinary thing a little bit that I'm doing.

And so depending on which grants I'm targeting, it's like, I'm either, I'm either to humanities or I'm to social sciences.

So like finding just the right fit is it has been one of the challenges.

But, you know, I mean, the, well, another reason, I guess, that or another explanation for how I've sort of taken on this identity is like, if I'm going to be a part of this community on my own dime, then I'm going to like, try to really actually, you know, take advantage of the fact that, you know, I'm paying membership fees for the wine association in Texas, like as an academic, I myself am a member of this, you know, association for wine in Texas.

And I'm like, might as well take advantage of, you know, any learning opportunities or whatever that are there. And so in the process of trying to understand the dynamics, the social dynamics and the knowledge dynamics and the environmental situation or whatever it is I've been trying to do for my research, I like can't help, but also just learn things that become integrated into my own personal practices.

And I'm sure you're also learning about the financial barrier or component of being a part of this kind of community as well.

And it's been, you know, I had mentioned there has been these kind of prominent cases of, you know, diversity issues or gender issues or something that had been happening just before I kind of put myself into this, into this space.

It's been really interesting watching that community figure things out, you know, like, it's like I'm watching it happen live, you know, people are like, okay, how are we going to handle these power dynamic challenges? How are we going to handle the fact that there's very little representation of LGBTQIA people? How are we going to handle the fact that, um, well, you know, and the sommelier who works in a restaurant works really long, hard hours and often doesn't get paid very much.

So there's economic concerns within that community itself. And so I'm sort of just watching all of that happen. You know, it's been really interesting.

interesting. Yeah, I imagine. Thank you. What are the larger implications or impact of your research in your eyes?

in your eyes? Yeah, so that's a good one. I like I had mentioned a couple minutes ago, I started this project thinking about taste making as place making, which as a geographer, I think is important, you know, if we think about what is taste and how does it matter and how do we curate it and whatever in place, how do places become what they are, places are just spaces or environments that have been imbued with meaning.

So that's like a pretty academic oriented thing, like people who care about geography might care about that, but maybe not other people as much, except people are often quite in love with the places that they love, that they inhabit, you know, so, so individuals might be interested in that. But it's, I would say much more kind of theoretical or, you know, academic interest.

But as I've been curating the project in that applied or community based or participatory way, that's when it sort of come into my mind that there are these elements that are going on in the wine industry that have those same levers of power and importance stemming way back to the dissertation that led to the fermented landscapes, that people have to make choices about what they represent, how they represent various products to different people.

And that influences how those products are made, which has huge implications for like what land is bought and sold, who owns that land, what workers are working that land, what conditions they're working in, how the distribution of income or benefit is going on all on the production side.

And then if you get to the consumption side, of course, who has access to wine, who thinks that, you know, it's valuable to know about these different things, what you gain by having a deeper understanding of wine than that you might not have had before.

So there's sort of these wider cultural connotations and economic connotations and like social equity issues going on in there as well. So that's where I sort of started leaning into this idea of sustainability. I also have a emphasis in sustainability in my research more broadly.

And so this idea of the three E's of sustainability, environment, economy and equity, those three elements are intertwined in various ways.

There's different models for how people represent it, visual models and conceptual models, but at least there's those three pillars that you might also say of sustainability.

might also say of sustainability. And so I thought, how can I understand these different elements of this project?

this project? So I think the wider significance may be going forward is that I'm using something that's got a history of being kind of, you know, like an elitist, whatever fine wine, but like using that as a heuristic or a lens to understand a variety of other related issues related to social equity, environmental concerns, climate change. Because they're all kind of intertwined in sort of a breed like pattern, but you're pulling at the threads to see what is actually impacting what. Exactly.

And given, you know, the kind of rapid and drastic environmental changes that we're experiencing, whatever you want to call that climate change or whatever, it's a demonstrated environmental effect that we're having that are, you know, different kinds of environmental events are getting closer together and more extreme and whatever.

And so all kinds of production of all kinds of different agricultural products or whatever are being affected, but wine is among them. And because wine is such a high value commodity, there's a lot of people that have power and money that are interested in it. So I just feel like it's a, it's a, even though you're kind of people might be like, why are you studying like wine? Like of all things, if you're interested in many different things that would be much more closely related to like marginalized people, for example, they're like, why are you picking this product here? But it's like, but if you want to think about who has power and control over how land is bought and sold and managed, if you just go straight to the top, you can see where that's, you know, follow those threads as you're pointing out.

out. What advice do you have for other researchers who are wanting to approach research, maybe similarly to how you are or yeah, what kind of lessons do you feel like you would love to pass on to others?

on to others? Sure. Yeah, I would say, well, yeah, just don't give up.

This is what I say to my students too. It's like, you know, going through a master's or a PhD or whatever, you know, there's always that moment where you're like, what have I done? You know, and you just have to kind of just, you know, take a deep breath and put your two feet on the ground and say, well, this is, this is where I'm at and this is what I'm doing. And maybe I take, take a breather walk away from it for a couple of days, but then come back with that fresh kind of conviction of like, this is, this is what I'm doing. And so in my case, you know, I haven't faced like huge hurdles, but we mentioned a couple of, a couple of the stumbling blocks, you know, and there's, there's other ones too, but let, you know, let's just say that it's not like a perfect process ever. But just kind of reminding yourself why you're doing it and just continuing to like be committed to whatever purpose that you have. So that's like a super cheesy way of putting it. But I'm sure somebody out there is like, you know, I need to hear this. Yeah. It's like the little pep talk, you know, it's like a little, little research, you know, like living life pep talk, like you can do it. Just, I used to be a marathon runner and like my mantra was just one foot in front of the other, you know, respect running is not for me.

So don't think about how many miles there are still to go. Like in the case of a marathon, maybe 25, but just keep putting one foot in front of the other. And so that's how I try to just get through hard things. It's just keep pushing through. But then, you know, being creative, you know, like we talked about the kind of out of the box part of this is like, how can I leverage my own expertise and my own interests and my own abilities in order to try to uncover something interesting about the world? So thinking creatively, solving problems. So as a Peace Corps volunteer, I like to think I'm really good at solving problems.

solving problems. So when they come up, I'm like, okay, what sort of creative solution can we, can we work around here?

can we work around here? Yeah, I will say the other part of my kind of mentoring strategy that's related to this a bit is like, I also try to be gentle with myself and also be gentle with other people. I'm part of a research collective called the Mother Scholar Collective. You can look us up on the web if you care to do so. But it's built around this, this idea that as academics, we can be radically flexible and radically inclusive to each other, accepting each other as whole people, that there's a lot going on in our lives and in the world that can be distracting, and it can be challenging. And we're all here trying to do the work that we're trying to do. And just accepting, like you said, like nothing goes to plan, you can have the best intentions, and you can try to keep your priorities in place, but just be nimble also, and be gentle with yourself.

Be nimble, be gentle. Thank you so much for this time. I learned a lot. I really appreciate your time. I know our listeners do as well. So thank you for joining us today. Thank you for having me.

Appreciate it. Thanks for joining us today. This podcast project is sponsored by Faculty Development using YouStar Studios at Alkek One on the hill in the bright and beautiful San Marcos, Texas.

Thank you to all the faculty who are making amazing strides in your research. We hope you join us next time. And until then, stay curious and dare to research outside of the box.