SAFN is pleased to announce that the 2025 winner of the Christine Wilson Graduate Student Award is Rikki Brown, for her essay “Endemic Grapes and Practices of Sovereignty in Georgian Winemaking.” The Christine Wilson Awards go to outstanding student research papers that examine topics within the perspectives in nutrition, food studies and anthropology. Reviewers noted Brown’s paper for the strong ethnography and engaging topic. Congratulations, Rikki Brown!
Rikki is a PhD Candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her dissertation, “New Transfigurations of Taste: Negotiating Power, Politics, and Place in Georgia’s Wine Economy” examines how wine has transformed from a cultural currency representing Georgian heritage, into one of Georgia’s largest economic markets, giving wine political affordance. Within the context of heightened geopolitics, particularly between Russia and the so-called West, her dissertation illustrates the practices that different actors – local winemakers, the state, and neoliberal organizations – utilize to determine the future and directionality of the Georgian wine economy. She asks how power is established, negotiated, and maintained, and how these negotiations transfigure traditional winemaking practices and conceptions of place that determine authenticity and value of wine. Rikki’s dissertation is based on over three years of fieldwork throughout Georgia’s winemaking regions and builds off interviews, apprenticeships in wineries, and in-depth research in Tbilisi’s consumer markets.
Rikki’s paper, “Endemic Grapes and Practices of Sovereignty in Georgian Winemaking,” examines power negotiations between the state and the local winemakers reviving, protecting, and cultivating rare endemic Georgian grapes. She argues that winemakers utilize rare grapes to determine sovereignty from the state while redefining what Georgian viticultural heritage is and can be. She complicates the notion of cultural heritage by teasing out a tension between Georgian Orthodoxy and rare endemic grapes as heritage, engaging with how winemakers are cultivating the Georgian nation and their own identities in relation to the state. An iteration of this paper is set to be published in a special issue of Agriculture and Human Values.
Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, Fulbright-Hays, Title VIII fellowships, and the American Research Center of the South Caucasus. Rikki’s work has been published on Anthropology News and in the Georgian Zine de:nostalgia. Her co-authored article, titled “Resisting Development through Heritage: Identities, Hydropower, and Wine in Lechkhumi, Georgia,” is scheduled to be released later this year in the journal Sociétés & Représentations. Rikki is actively involved in academic groups in Georgia and the US, participating in writing groups, programming, and sharing her work through guest lectures and presentations. This fall, she will present virtually for Ilia State University (Georgia), the American Anthropological Association, and the Association for Slavic, Eastern European, and Eurasian Studies annual conferences.
Prior to starting the PhD, Rikki had over ten years of hospitality industry experience in the Midwest and California, completing her Level 1 sommelier exam. The experience inspired her to challenge hegemonic tasting knowledge and brought her closer to Georgian wine. Rikki has also spent extensive time in Eurasia; besides Georgia, she has lived in Russia and Turkey, and worked in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Romania. She holds an MA in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago and a BA in Russian Studies from Grand Valley State University.
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