Hello All!
After a busy weekend, this week was calm yet busy with small tasks to be completed in and out of class! As the end of February neared, there were many tasks and emails to be responded to about the Fall 2020 semester. Along with learning in class here!
My classes this week were overall good, I am really loving the hands-on opportunities that are offered. The hands-on opportunities this week included harvesting olives off of trees that weren’t harvested in the fall. My teacher offered us the experience to pick, collect, and then make them into table olives. When starting this class, the teacher was bummed that we would miss the harvesting of olives along with the spring flowering due to the timing of the program. When he discovered two olive trees that had not been harvested he knew this was the perfect opportunity for us to learn. In olive production, we also finished the biomass procedure for the olive trees. Since arriving here and starting class, during lab we would prune the trees and collect the branches. In Greece, it is illegal to burn these branches, so instead, it was decided that they would be shredded and used as mulch to give back some of the nutrients into the ground. This project took many class periods, but it was finally finished this week.
(Almond Trees flowering on campus)
My environmental soil science class is probably close to one of my favorites because of the information we are learning. This week we learned about the mass of water in soil and how to determine it, along with how to take small soil samples in different areas of the field to see how long water is staying in the soil. I find this very interesting because their soil type at AFS school is mainly clay, which tends to hold more water for a longer period of time. This is also very interesting for the natives who have been studying soil moisture due to the lack of snow and rain they have had this winter period.
(Thessaloniki consistently has neat finds and photo opportunities)
On Saturday, myself along with five other ladies traveled to a winery to have a tour. This experience was offered through our Greek Culture class, and the rest of the students stayed back as they had completed this tour last weekend while I was in Berlin. Before arriving at the winery, I was pumped and super excited to learn about the industry, and of course, trying the wine. Upon arriving the owner greeted us, and it was a woman. Women in agriculture is not a topic talked about and is really not something that is accepted in Greece. A very small percentage of women participate in the agricultural industry so meeting someone who was raising grapes and processing them was astonishing. After talking with her for some time, it was evident that she has had to move mountains to get where she is. She talked about how in the winery business, there are very few women involved and she has to push hard to make a place for her business.
Her winery is built off of 15 hectares, which is about 37 acres. She has many different plots in different soil, and different climates as some are in the mountains. Their winery is all organic, producing approximately 700-800 kilos grapes per stremma which calculates to about 3.5 tons per acre. They could get up to about 4 tons per acre, but they decide to harvest at the end of September through the beginning of October to get the best quality of the grapes. They produce multiple varieties of grapes which allows them to make many different types of wine with different tastes. They produce sparkling, white, and red wine.
(The views at the winery tour; The last pictures is the bottling machine and can bottle 2,000 bottles per hour.)
To produce white and sparkling wine, they sort the variety of grapes that they are using and press them; after pressing they remove the juice and only ferment the juice within the tanks. To produce rose wine, they begin with sorting the grapes and lightly crush them. For rose they allow the skin and juice to ferment at the same time. The skins will only ferment for a maximum of 2 days and may be removed before then depending on the color desired. To produce red wine, the same procedure is done with the rose wine, except the skins are allowed to ferment the whole time and be removed afterward.
After learning about their processes, we were able to begin tasting the wine. The owner knew that a true wine tasting was probably not ideal and instead made a game. Wine tasting focuses a lot on smell over taste, to be a good wine taster it is necessary to be able to smell a spectrum of scents. To be able to test our senses, she set up 15 small smellies where we had to smell them with a partner and then use the smell wheel to determine what we were smelling. This took some time and really made us wonder if our noses really knew what was going on. We all got about 50% right on this game. Afterwards we tasted four different wines and had to match them to a description she gave. This was fun because it allowed us to put scenarios together of where we might be enjoying wine. After that game, she gave us all the opportunity to choose a wine without telling anyone and come up with a situation. This was probably my favorite because it allowed for lots of funny stories and conversations. After all of this we were blessed to have the opportunity to sit and ask any questions from anything about her personal life to her career in the winery business.
(The Game Setup)
On Sunday, I needed a long workday and also a day to relax and take some time for myself. But the weekend did not end there. In Europe Monday, March 2nd was a bank holiday for Clean Monday. This weekend was supposed to be filled with lots of Carnival Celebrations throughout the whole country of Greece, but unfortunately due to the Coronavirus, the Greek Health Organization shut down all events. Monday, a group of three girls and I decided to take an adventure and go on a tour guide recommended to us. The tour was supposed to take us to a village in Halkidiki for a feast, but it ended up not being what we expected. This tour brought us to some places with absolutely stunning views and an opportunity to awe at the beauty that God created. Unfortunately the tour was not what we expected and due to some of the tourists on the tour we felt extremely uncomfortable and unsafe. We were about an hour from Thessaloniki, and thankfully enough Thessaloniki has a large bus route that we could take back to campus. This ended up causing some issues between us and the company, but after reflecting on the situation I think it taught us all that it is important to rely on our gut feelings along with the importance of traveling in a group. If we had not been on this adventure all together, I would be fearful of what could have happened. In the end we learned more about how we all react to stress and pressure along with the Thessaloniki busses that run outside of town.
(Pictures from Sunday, there were too many good ones to choose!)
I would like to add a final note, that Perrotis College, The American Farm School, Iowa State University, and all the other home universities are working together to communicate and make educated decisions on our safety with concerns to the coronavirus. They have communicated many safety and travel procedures to be followed.
- With Love, Cambrie
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