Fulbright Update
Professional burdens: Wine tasting, sumptuous banquet
Sometimes the burdens of academia are almost too much to bear. Then other times…

At the invitation of fellow academics, I fulfilled my professional responsibilities last semester, and visited the wine science department at the Technical University of Moldova. There, my two Fulbright colleagues and I were greeted by the Technical University’s rector (president), and two of the world’s leading experts in wine science. The trip was thoughtfully arranged by my colleague Ian Toma.

Wine "class" at the Technical Univ., fall 2023

The experts gave us a tour of their impressive facilities, including numerous fancy, modern machines used to test wine. One machine could test up to 100 elements in a single sample, things like sugar content, Ph, and so on. Most of the scientific discussion was well over my head, but I understood the main idea, which is that the production of wine is very complex and exacting.

After the tour, my colleagues and I were invited to sit at a long table featuring a sumptuous buffet. To fulfill my academic responsibility, the professional thing to do was to eat copious amounts of outstanding items like red peppers stuffed with vegetables, chicken cutlets, and sour cherry pies (placintas, in Romanian). Then I really fell on my professional sword when our hosts started pouring 11 different varieties of wine. To not drink would have been unprofessional. Some of the wine was what they call vin nou, new wine, which is sweeter and without the complexities of “finished” wines, according to the experts. Then we tried lots of whites and reds before we got to the dessert wines. No, I didn’t drink 11 full glasses of wine, and I did use the small bucket to pour out excess wine from every sample. (A Google search says this is inelegantly called a spittoon, which conjurs up images of spur-adorned cowboys and swinging-gate Western saloons.) I liked the dry whites the best.

I learned more about wine in the two hours at the Technical University than I had known previously. And most importantly, I used the opportunity to practice my professional collegiality as an academic. I know my colleagues must be proud.