Exploring Ethnobotany and Wine

Ethnobotany was one of my favorite classes in college. The study of how plants affect humans and the human culture, and then how humans impact the plant world around them. What first comes to mind is maize and how it was traced on the North American continent up from Mexico. Not only did it teach us where these humans travelled, but we see how the plant itself was eventually domesticated and adapted for the different climates it was brought to. None of this happened quickly. Maize was domesticated over 9000 years ago and it didn't really even get up into the area that would become the United States until about 4000 years ago. I think everyone knows that eventually maize became what we know to be corn today.

I took that class because I only needed one more class to graduate. Toward the end of the quarter, my advisor told me I was still one credit short to graduate. My finances at the time wouldn't have afforded an entire other quarter so I asked the professor teaching my ethnobotany class if she could give me a project to do in exchange for one credit hour. Looking back on it, that seems like a nervy ask. She agreed to it, though.

What I had originally wanted to do was grow my own papyrus, mash it to make paper papyrus, and then enscribe onto it a page out of the Egyptian Book of the Dead.

At the time, I was living in a subterranean apartment that had no patio of any sort. Why I thought I could grow papyrus in my tiny apartment, I'll never know. Still, I searched the nurseries of Columbus, Ohio to see if any of them had a papyrus plant. One said they had just sold their last one and so I took that as a sign. The only option I had (in my mind) was to send away for some sheets of papyrus from - where else - Egypt. I still have the thick envelope it was sent in with colorful postage stamps and rubber stamp marks for the air mail to get it here.

With a fountain pen that I dipped in India ink, I did end up drawing out one page of the Egyptian Book of the Dead.

My ethnobotany project - a page out of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, hand drawn on papyrus from Egypt. I put myself in the picture for size reference.

Though I didn't make the paper myself, I was proud of what I made. So much so that I still have it, framed, over 20 years later. (This was an anthropology degree I sought about 7 years after I graduated from OSU with a Communications degree. That's why it's only about 20 years ago.)

Several years after that, I bought a house and eventually did buy a papyus plant from a local nursery. As one might expect from a plant used to living in the Nile River, it required gobs of water. I debated planting it in my koi pond but thought better of that since it wouldn't survive the winter like the koi would. Instead, I put it in a huge pot and watered that plant almost daily.

Believe it or not, I kept the papyrus alive for maybe two years. When it got cold, I'd attach it to a dolly and bring it into the house. Once it was warm enough, I'd strap it back onto that dolly and put it in the back yard. Eventually, though, we'd both had enough of the arrangement. Almost a decade after the ethnobotany project, I let the plant dry out and attempted to finally make paper out of it.

It didn't work. But, I tried.

Now, though, I can recognize a papyrus plant anytime I see one (which isn't very often).

That class was just one aspect of anthropology that fascinates me but it speaks to one of the main reasons why I recently became so passionate about wine.

Every week, someone comes into our shop, learns that my name is in fact Burgundie, I am the owner, and so then they ask when I started drinking wine. They assume my primary interest in wine is solely in the drinking of it, and that couldn't be farther from the truth. Asking when I started drinking wine isn't really the right question. Really, the question is why I became interested in wine.

My history with wine isn't interesting. Though my grandmother was Sicilian, we didn't have bottles of Italian wine with every meal. Though my name is Burgundie, my mother wasn't some wine connoisseur. In fact, my grandmother drank wine so infrequently, that two glasses made her drunk. My mother was an artist and told me that burgundy was her favorite color. I started drinking wine when I was 22 because a baby-sized jug of shiraz was something like $7. For the longest time I didn't even bother with wine because it gave me such a terrible hangover that it wasn't even worth it. Now, of course, I know that I was drinking sub-par corporate wine with all kinds of crappy additives.

But still, it's not just the alcohol that, today, interests me about wine.

I got a degree in anthropology for a reason. The study of humans is truly fascinating. We're terrible animals but we do interesting things (when we haven't lost our compassion for one another). When I was in my twenties I fell in love with coffee for the same reason I've fallen in love with wine. All the stories and geography that surround it. It's just an added bonus that I also like the beverage.

Perhaps, like with people, I like the beverage more when I learn more about it. How, where, when, and why it was grown. Who grew and produced it. Wine and coffee both have a terroir - a place, a culture, an environment around them that give it their je ne sais quoi, their unique characteristics, their flavor, their personality.

Like with the papyrus project, I learn more about something by doing something with it. With these wines, I learn more about them because I've chosen to lead wine tastings every week (Wednesdays at 6 PM!). When I pick out the wines to highlight, I get excited about the soil the grapes grew in, the altitude if there was any, the way the wine was made, and the story of the people who made it. It's truly a rabbit hole. It's like when I first got into teaching yoga. You decide to teach headstand, for example, and then you learn more about anatomy and physiology, the spine, the vertebra, blood pressure, and even hypertension. You could just teach the pose, but then where's the fun (and safety) in that?

So it is with wine. If you wanted to, you could dedicate an entire career just focusing on France and their wines. The geography of L'Hexagone (a term used for the country because it is shaped like a hexagon) is so diverse, one could nerd out solely on her soils. France has mountains, valleys, rivers, seas, oceans, a history of glacial activity, Le Mistral - a dry wind that comes up from the Medeterranean, and nearly every kind of growing scenario you can think of.

With the geography of a country comes the story if its people. From there you could dig deeper into the families and their relationship to vineyards, farming, and how much of an impact wine has or has not had on their ancestry.

You know, just recently, someone told me that I should try to bring in my wine reps more often to do wine tastings because they make it more interesting. I was told people don't really like to learn all these details about wine.

I reject this. Let me get nerdier about one specific aspect of grape growing: biodynamic farming. The point of biodynamic farming is to retain diversity in the soils, to try to be as sustainable as possible, use Nature's own tools, and a number of other reasons any good farmer will tell you.

Let's look at natural insect repellants.

Did you know that oregano can be planted near grapevines to repel certain kinds of beetles?

Mint can deter ants and aphids.

Other types of natural repellants that vignerons use are hyssop, lavendar, thyme, rosemary, and yarrow. They'll plant these herbs around their grapevines, but also make them into a kind of tea to spray directly on the vines as well.

Wouldn't you rather consume something that was grown using natural resources than quick and aggressive synthetic chemicals? Sure, the farmers will tell you this means they'll have smaller crops sometimes, and that it's far more work for them. But, like becoming a teacher, most farmers aren't in it for the money. Besides, there are a number of studies (here's just one) that link pesticide usage to higer rates of cancer in farmers.

For me, all of the stuff surrounding wine goes back to the concept of quality over quantity - a concept I wish the United States would embrace more often. But I don't want this to spin into a larger rant. Talk about a rabbit hole. We could get into the lifestyle of farmers in the United States, the contracts they've gotten themselves into just to keep their farms, their rate of depression and suicide, immigrant workers, and the voracious American appetite that also has an expectation of impossible perfection. The amount of food waste in the U.S. is appalling.

But, I digress.

I decided to open the wine shop for a handful of reasons - I needed a next job and wanted to remain self-employed, I wanted a place to buy good wine in Petersburg, I wanted a place where I could go to sit and write while drinking a glass of wine, and I wanted to create a kind of Parisian sanctuary for myself. None of those reasons, really, is because I have a long history with wine, or even that because of my name I was pre-ordained to open a wine shop.

What I've found is a topic that has unending things to learn and therefore a plethora of things I can teach - which in turn helps me to learn.

In my upcoming blog posts for the shop, I'm going to focus on one topic each article. A grape, a style of wine making, a region, a type of soil, a producer, etc.

If there's any topic anyone is specifically interested in learning more about, let me know. Otherwise, I'll just pull ideas out of my hat and jump right into that rabbit hole. I hope you'll jump in with me.