Someone once said, “Life is too short to drink bad wine.”
Greeley native Amanda Fleming agrees with that, and she set to travel overseas to learn how to improve wine not only for its drinkers but for the people who produce it.
Before last Thanksgiving, Fleming, a Greeley West High School alumna, learned she was the recipient of the Austrian Marshall Plan Scholarship. The scholarship funds Fleming to travel and study at Graz University of Technology in southeast Austria.
Fleming is a current food science Ph.D. student at the University of Arkansas’ Dale Bumpers College of Agricultural, Food and Life Sciences.
She is the first researcher from the Arkansas food science department to receive the scholarship since 2019, according to the University of Arkansas Division of Agriculture Research and Extension. A stoppage was placed on it in 2020 because of COVID-19.
Fleming and her daughter will fly out at the end of February, and her husband will join them in mid-March. They will live in Austria for four months.
“I was excited but also a little nervous because there is a lot of preparation that goes into the travels,” she said.
Fleming and her family will get chances to sightsee and explore, but the majority of her time will be dedicated to strengthening her research on assisting wine producers and grape growers in the southeastern United States to make wines comparable in quality to wines made from American native muscadine grapes and traditional European wine grapes. Muscadine grapes are native to the southeastern part of the United States.
Her goal of assisting wine producers and grape growers in the southeastern United States stems from wanting more creativity when it comes to wine products and making them cost friendly. Moreover, she said that producing wine in California and Oregon is expensive, so it’s important to not only find alternative regions to grow grapes but also to use different grapes.
She said she works with hybrid and muscadine grapes.
While overseas, she’ll be working with a world-class staff studying flavor and aroma attributes, along with studying different compounds which give wines their smells and tastes, she said. She will work with a well-known analytical chemist, Erich Leitner, who specializes in wine. She said the four months overseas will also be a great networking opportunity for her and her family.
After graduating from Greeley West High School, Fleming briefly attended CU Boulder to major in molecular and cellular developmental biology. She transferred after her first year to Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon.
She graduated from Lewis and Clark with her bachelor’s degree in sociology and anthropology but was undecided on how to utilize her skills and education moving forward.
In 2008, after she graduated from college, she visited a family friend’s vineyard in Sonoma Valley, California.
“I fell in love with it,” she said.
She also fell in love with the idea of helping in the vineyard. The owner informed her that the vineyard was only 5 acres, so she wouldn’t gain much experience. The owner connected her with a nearby winery where she could work for a few months to help with its harvest and have an enriched experience.
That experience turned into a career.
In 2019, Fleming and her husband moved to Arkansas because she became the head winemaker at Post Winery, the largest winery in the state.
The winery is connected with the food science program at the University of Arkansas. That connection led her to meet Dr. Renee Threlfall, who oversees the university’s wine research program. Fleming said she enrolled in the Ph.D. program at the encouragement of Threlfall.
In the future, Fleming wants to pursue an academic career within a university cooperative extension program. The extension programs focus on agricultural education, animal sciences, horticultural and other applied research.
“My goal is to work in grape and wine extension research,” she said. “Have one foot in academics and research and the other foot in actually helping people in the commercial industry.”
Fleming has always had a joy for science, but her trip to that California vineyard all those years ago unlocked her love for horticulture.
“If I see there’s a struggling plant that someone has left out on the free table at school, I have to take it and do something with it,” she said. “I can’t let those things die. I need to nurse it back to life.”
She plans on graduating from the Ph.D. program in December 2026, but she still has a lot of research and studying to do until then.
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