Date: Thursday 23 May 2024 at 17.30 BST
Venue: Barlett School of Architecture, 77 Wicklow Street, London, WC1X 9JY
Cost: £45 – To sign up go to our Eventbrite page
Come join us for a delightful evening at our in-person Wine Tasting event. Sip a variety of exquisite wines while supporting a great cause. All proceeds will go towards LRG’s new Emergency and Sudden Opportunity Fund.
This will be a relaxed landscape-focused tasting of delicious and unusual wines from the Western Loire Valley in France in the company of hosts Alexander Cassini and Tim Waterman. Four distinct regions with markedly different characters will be represented: Pays-Nantais, Angers, Saumur, and Touraine—from the north and south banks of the Loire from Nantes to Tours. We will enjoy, among others, a refined sparkling Crémant de Loire from Saumur, an intriguing red wine made from the heritage Pineau d’Aunis grape in Anjou, and a superb organic Anjou Chenin Blanc from Savennières.
With each wine we will taste the landscape—the “terroir” of wine. Wine expertise is unnecessary to attend—we will cater to experts and novices both.
The wines will comprise one sparkling wine, three whites, and three reds.
The event will be held in person at Bartlett School of Architecture, 77 Wicklow St, London, WC1X 9JY. Don’t miss out on this fantastic opportunity to enjoy some fine wines and make contribute to our global landscape community.
Landscape architect and vineyard scholar Alexander Cassini will present a short talk, Public Terroirs:
“Public Terroirs” describes through site specific and precise means, the rudiments for a seasonally revolving public vineyard space expressing local rituals, site and soil particularities, and unique micro-climates. This academic research began in 2015 as part the Masters in Landscape Architecture curriculum and has now become the foundation for Alexander Cassini’s ongoing research on how regenerative farming practices can mitigate climate change in viticulture.
The LRG Emergency & Sudden Opportunity (ESO) Fund
A fast-changing and sometimes more dangerous world requires nimble landscape researchers. The Landscape Research Group’s Emergency and Sudden Opportunity (ESO) Fund provides quick, straightforward access to small amounts of funding to get out of a scrape or to speedily pursue a time-sensitive opportunity. Funds will be made available directly to scholars or to a third party who is acting to assist them. This event is the first event to raise funds for this new resource.
Alexander Cassini
Alexander Cassini is a Franco-American landscape architect and urban designer at Phytolab in Nantes, France. After completing an urban planning degree at the University of Cincinnati and a Masters in Landscape Architecture at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, he practiced several years alongside Claude Cormier in Montreal. In 2021, he decided to return to his Loire valley roots where he enjoys practicing landscape architecture in an urban context while also researching regenerative vineyard practices in the countryside. Through many of his endeavors, he seeks to engage people with specific experiences that improve their health, perception of the world, and ecological awareness. Recently he cofounded CLACLAC, a design studio mixing experiential graphic design and planting for temporary exhibitions and installations.
Tim Waterman
Tim Waterman is Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Landscape Research Group and Professor of Landscape Theory and Inter-Programme Collaboration Director at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. His research addresses landscape imaginaries from the utopian to the quotidian. As a former restaurateur, chef, and food and drink enthusiast, Waterman’s interest in the imagination extends to food and taste and he brings these sensibilities to wider realms of moral, political, social, ecological, radical, and utopian imaginaries. He is the author of The Landscape of Utopia: Writings on Everyday Life, Taste, Democracy, and Design; editor of Landscape Citizenships with Ed Wall and Jane Wolff; editor of Landscape and Agency: Critical Essays with Ed Wall, and editor of the Routledge Handbook of Landscape and Food with Joshua Zeunert.