Not From Concentrate. (no pulp, either)

The fields of International Security and the vineyards of Oenology are the investments of my college career. What’s more, I have marked off a smaller plot to care for with greater attention. Before I list the coordinates of my design, I need to massage the fibers and branches that begin this root-bound endeavor.

While the origins of interests are never so clearly marked as a fire hydrant, I can faithfully say that a spark turned blue with heat in a white, 15-seater van en route to a Purdue Chicken Processing Plant during one of many Georgia summers. Buckled inside were 10 young Iraqi men—all fresh with leather shoes, starched collars, and manicured hair, 1 older man from Sudan, 2 teenage Nepalese siblings, my superior—a beautiful Kenyan refugee, and myself. The mission was resettlement and self-sufficiency by way of employment. We were in the car no more than 2 hours, a time lost between Rockabilly and Arab pop music, and the day was ours for spending. Once within a 5-mile radius of the chicken compound we no longer had the lung-capacity for music. The smell was foul (literally), lingering in the city’s summer haze, and it wrapped around everything—your grocery store and friendly, neighborhood ‘Mick-a-dee’s’ included. I then became conscience of how strange it was to engage those Iraqi men in particular as refugees in a resettlement plan of The United States—the invading and occupying republic of their homeland. The sentiment, “I’m sorry about the war, but we’re glad you’re here” was washed over with contempt. Watching the confident, sharp-looking Iraqi men walk into the processing plant for casual job interviews while the last shift filtered into the parking lot adorned in plastic smocks and fitted knee-high galoshes was awkward to say the least.

While my interest in international relations extends in many other directions, an occurrence of this sort was most poignantly felt and raw.

The vineyard on the other hand is the aesthetic outlaw of my academic career. After spending 9 months upon the French terroir, 4 of which spent under the instruction of my university in Paris and Bordeaux, I preserved interest in one insight: Wine is alive, a singled embodiment of the earth that engrossed its seeds. Never in my adolescence had I considered wine to be of any great consequence—spare, of course, for bad breath and the occasional headache. But never mind that—wine is geopolitics incarnate! The distinction between a Cabernet produced in the same country on different terrain in different soil amidst different vegetation and animals stimulated a very cordial setting of relationships. In a way very much like, “Oh, so this is how it works,” I set off to envelope the ambiance of this setting in that of my topic to follow.