Wine holds a pivotal role in the intellectual and cultural progress of the Mediterranean region where numerous great civilizations were born. For centuries, the holly drink has been at the core of Mediterranean life, fuelling intellectual pursuits, moments of leisure, and spiritual gatherings. My map is an appreciation for its natural existence as well as its widespread distribution throughout the region. Different parts of the Mediterranean region enrich the range the characteristics of wine with the native grapes and all of them are our heritages.
In my project, I endeavored to create a map of native wine grapes and what characteristics they convey to the wine. Because I see wine as a gift of nature, I wanted to emphasize its natural side and made a pastoral visualization. The signs inside or around the grapes imply what characteristics they give to the wine in terms of tannin, color, acidity, and sugar level, The waves on the Mediterranean Sea implicitly represent the distribution of wine production from Mesopotamia and Caucasia through the West Mediterranean Region.
Almost, all parts of the map is hand-drawn by me. In summary, the workflow was creating datasets from the information I could get from Wikipedia pages of the native wine grapes and the Vitis International Catalogue, visualizing the datasets on ArcGIS pro and paper-printing them, making sketch works on the visualizations, finalizing my map and the layout on Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. It was a true pleasure to have the grape plant itself as the central element of the map.
Have a look at all the interesting details in the original pdf (32mb).
The map was created as part of the course Project Map Creation at TU Wien in summer semester 2023.
Student: Dilara Bozkurt