Writing About Wine and Culture

Here are some scenes from our Lobo Gardens Field Day on Thursday, March 28th at UNM.

Our Writing About Wine & Culture class would like to raise a toast to Christina Hoberg, UNM Lobo Gardens Director, and Alan Billau, UNM Arboriculture Supervisor.  A special thanks for your support and guidance through the vine planting process.  Our happy vines are almost ready for transplanting!!        

During this unit of the semester we will examine the life cycle of wine production and vine cultivation including an examination of issues of labor, climate change, and environmental impact of wine production.   Our root stock vines are flourishing in the Biology Greenhouse (all twelve of our new vines are sprouting new leaves).  We hope to plant them in the Lobo Gardens on campus by the end of April.   We spent a chilly first day of spring on Thursday, March 21 at the Lobo Gardens restoring the planter boxes and planting new seeds in our Field Working Groups.               

"Seeing art as a catalyst for social interaction and change." Howard Meehan's mantra for the design of public art, invites us to see writing, wine, and the cultivation of vines as transformation processes and catalysts for social interaction and understanding. For further information about our guest artists: See: William Freer Studios at:       https://www.williamfreerstudio.com/         Howard Meehan Studios at:  http://www.hmeehan.com/

Artists William Freer and Howard Meehan joined our class on Thursday, March 7, 2019  for a visit to the Greenhouse to see our vines and to lead a conversation about public art and the rhetoric of wine,     “What’s In a Name?: Branding & the Rhetoric of Wine.”  

           

Designing Your Dream Wine & Food Pairing Dinner.  Our task as  group field exercise this week was to plan and rhetorically represent our own “fantasy” six course meals of wine and food pairings.      Use Robert & Virginia Hoffman’s Pairing Wine with Food: Everything You Would Like to Know About Pairing Wine with Food and More!   1.        Plan your Dream Wine and Food Pairing Dinner menu with your group members using descriptions of each course engaging the rhetoric of wine (applying language that engages the erotics and aesthetics of all of the senses: taste, smell, texture, sight, etc).   2.        Design a menu to present your menu via digital format: Instagram; blog; Powerpoint, Prezi, etc. to display your Six Course Wine Dinner (with detailed descriptions of each course and photo illustrations); 3.        Take photos, draw sketches, or download digital images of your Dream Wine & Food Pairing six course meal (appetizers/starters; soup; salad; palate c