This week on Arizona Illustrated Farming on the Edge of what's Possible.

A trip to Arizona Wine Country.

So everything that you might have eight weeks to do in France somewhere, you might have four weeks or five at the most year.

Tracking moon cycles through art ecology illustrated on each cycle to ground the calendar in what's happening in the environment around us.

A look at a new therapy for anxiety and trauma.

They've realized that ketamine seems to be really effective with depression at this point and also with trauma and the architecture of series favorite places returns.

The interior represents how spaces respond to different conditions and programing the results and know to floors and appearing a life Hello and welcome to an all new episode of Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara and thanks for joining us from here at Mission Garden.

You know, the history of agricultural cultivation dates back 3500 years here at the base of a mountain.

And the goal of the garden is to combine historical knowledge along with modern science so that Arizona is better prepared for the future.

And these grapes right here are a part of that future.

These grapes are grown not to eat, but to ferment and drink.

In this next story, we went to several wineries to hear how they're creating unique vintages in our unlikely terrain.

[Blues guitar music] (Kent) We're about two miles west of the town of Elgin, started in 90, 1990 with my folks.

I think there are only about five vineyards or wineries in the state.

When we started back in 90.

At that time, the Elgin Road was effectively all dirt.

And we we named the named our vineyard.

Bueno Suerte, because that's what the guys who helped us plant the vineyard said when he left on his last day.

because he felt we were insane.

We planted 17 acres in ‘90, 3 of which were experimental, quote unquote.

[Guitar music] By the mid 2000's, the industry really took off.

Sonoita itself has seen a real spurt of growth just in the last five or six years.

I think we've added six or seven new wineries, almost a winery a year.

The fact that we survived.

Yeah.

Maybe give them a little hope.

I don't know.

But we are basically honing down not only what does well in Arizona, but what does well on this particular property.

We're getting there.

We're slowly but surely getting there.

Still.

Yeah.

[Spacey Music] (Jesse) We're at Buhl Memorial Vineyard and the Kansas settlement region just south of Wilcox.

Generally due east of Tucson.

And so you're coming down I-10 and you're going through Benson, and then you end up coming to the crest of the Sulfur Springs Valley.

And it opens up in front of you.

You see the playa, you see Dos Cabezas Mountain.

Depending on the season, you know, you've got the ocotillo is blooming off the side of the highway and the wildflowers.

It can be colorful in the desert.

[Spacey music fades to Mexican music] (Jesse) American Vineyards took ownership of Buhl Memorial Vineyard in 2014 and brought me in to manage it.

I manage a crew of anywhere from 10 to 26 people at this point, and we'll either have one or two picking crews going at one time.

(Speaking Spanish) So our target to harvest wine grapes here is is generally the third or fourth week of July through the month of August, maybe into September a little bit, which is the monsoon season.

So that that creates challenges because you're trying to get the fruit at the right chemistry.

You know, the sugars are increasing every day there, the acids falling.

So you want to hit that balance.

The climatic extremes here in Arizona is it puts us farming on the edge of what's possible.

That gets warm pretty quick after bud break.

And we don't have a terribly early bud break either.

So you have a compressed season.

So everything that you might have eight weeks to do in France somewhere, you might have four weeks or five at the most.

Here it is very hot and at times we get heat waves.

But it's not necessarily the dryness that we have to battle here.

We can we can irrigate and we don't use much water to keep these vines happy, but we get too much rain.

And that sometimes during a monsoon makes a lot of challenges.

We do a lot of work in the vineyards to keep each cluster in a nice little well-ventilated microclimate behind the leaves and avoiding sunburn as well as.

Yeah, concern.

So it's again, striking that balance.

You want varietal correctness to shine through and then show some of the terroir.

So that's the soil, the the uniqueness of the place that includes the people farming it, that includes the climate, everything that you can't replicate anywhere else in the world but this one spot.

When bins are full, we get them back to the to the shop, get them weighed, documented and loaded into the refrigerated truck to cool down and hold them safe until they can be transported to the winery.

[Soft guitar music] (James) Right now at the winery.

It's our busiest time of year.

We are taking the grapes we're picking.

And right now we're turning those grapes into wine.

We have done about 50 tonnes worth of grapes so far.

There's pressing there's I mean, there's inoculations with yeast.

And ultimately it's just a two month period of just where we transform this entire year's worth of work into a product that we can share with people.

Start with the Calibri Ganache .

This is the fruit forward wine.

We have two vintages that are in different stages, so we age our wines for two years are red wines.

[Music, people laughing] (James) They put it in a barrel.

It needs to age.

It needs to get some time to refine the tannins, but also just to give more character and complexity to the wines as well.

We make our wines right on the boundary of failure and greatness.

There's a safe route you can take and make really marketable wines if you're good.

But you as a winemaker, we want to build stuff that's like super complex, and to do that takes lots of risk.

That's kind of where we're at right now is just kind of figuring out where we are, where we stand, how we can make the best wine we can possibly.

The idea is to kind of transform people to a different vision of what wine tasting is.

You know, in my opinion, this is Arizona.

We are outside most of the time.

It's beautiful weather most of the time, even when it's not beautiful weather, when it's raining, that's beautiful weather for an Arizonan.

[Guitar music] We like to kind of showcase what the beauty is of the state.

It's interesting to figure out a new terroir for a region that hasn't really established it yet.

I guess that's my job as a winemaker to help do that.

[Guitar music] (Kent) There's no question that you can see the difference in vintage, you know, comparisons based on the weather that we've gotten and which obviously involves monsoon moisture and So, yeah, the more intense the monsoon, generally speaking, the less fruit driven our wines are.

This place is not about.

High end uppity stuff.

We're very trying to be very welcoming and hope people enjoy their, you know, the scenery and the wine.

In a very relaxed and comfortable setting.

And pretty.

Yeah.

[Upbeat music] (James) Wine is it so complex if it's done well.

And you can sit there and you can ponder it.

You can think about it as you sit there and sip it and you're like, wow, this wine from Arizona in you like it?

And you never have to marvel.

You can glean that, you know, maybe there is something out there besides the status quo, right?

There's something that is beyond your knowledge that makes it interesting.

And ultimately that's what wine is about.

It's all about exploring and trying different things.

(Kent) You can taste the struggle.

Yeah.

You can taste the struggle.

[Music fades up and out] Every year.

Weaver Yung Hands creates lunar trackers, which are beautiful planning tools like calendars rooted in desert ecology and organized by the moon cycles.

Now the goal is to inspire people with desert flora and fauna and show them how the moon cycles are affecting their lives.

We follow Weaver through several ecosystems as they explain the creation and use of their lunar trackers.

I've just always felt more interested in what non-human beings were doing.

I think I get a lot out of observing, imagining, being other creatures besides human.

Spending so much time alone in nature and having that dialog with nature makes you look to nature a lot for the answers to your questions.

Ways of relating to time has long been an interest.

We completely miss out on really the beauty of cycles by relating to time in such a linear way.

Drawing is essentially meditating upon something, honoring it, reflecting on it, saying you want to spend time knowing it better.

I would draw lunar calendars and just give them to my friends and say, please document things in your life on these lunar calendars.

I started making these eight years ago on pieces of butcher paper.

The first year I mass printed them and sold them was 2019.

Interestingly, they began the same week of the pandemic, beginning.

It's laid out by a moon cycles rather than by Gregorian months of the calendar that we currently use.

And there's Sonoran Desert ecology, illustrated on each cycle to ground the calendar in what's happening in the environment around us.

The gravitational pull of the moon affects everything on earth.

A motivation is to get more information about what the movement of the moon does to you.

It is an open question.

Water is so much less dense than other material objects that it can actually be observed to be moving with the moon.

But every object on earth is affected by the gravitational pull of the moon, even though it's not on an easily detectable level.

All calendars throughout history have been either based solely on lunar cycles or incorporated lunar cycles.

Until pretty recently in human history.

The lunar tracker is what could be called a calendar.

I don't use the word calendar because etymologically kalendaria of Roman culture were account books for tracking and collecting debt and interest.

The kalends were the first day of the month and when people would go around collecting debt.

Our Gregorian calendar today is not so different.

The first day of the month is still a date of perpetual debt collection.

The wall print is like a quick reference for people who don't want to dive as deep and then the book is for documenting your health fluctuations, menstruation, fertility awareness, for documenting dreams for projects and work such as farming and gardening.

If you're not into tracking, they can purely be used as a creative prompt, a drawing assignment, a poem a day.

Moon cycles definitely affect our existence, and I think for a lot of people that use them, there is a genuine desire to see what in their life aligns with moon cycles and wonder What can I write that I found today?

Anxiety disorders are on the rise and because of that there's been a lot more research, interest and acceptance of the therapeutic use of psychedelics.

Now, ketamine is one such drug, and some studies show that when it's administered by a licensed professional and combined with psychotherapy, it can be effective against a wide range of anxiety disorders.

Mary Pat: Just kind of get cozy in the room.

And then the shock comes and then you start to feel yourself kinda melt into the chair.

Therapist: Just let your body relax.

Let your mind relax for me.

Mary Pat: My visions are all with, like, a little color things.

All that could be colored pink.

Like colored red.

And then it starts coming up.

Some of the things that have come up in my childhood, some of the things that I hadn't looked at, some of the things that would help me move on.

Sheena: I'm better at these than anything related to fractions.

I had a very clear picture.

I'm sitting in this cage and all of these people were holding me up.

And for me, that just was sort of in our weakest moments.

There's always someone to lift you up, and it's okay to not be strong all the time.

Tim: Ketamine is it's a synthesized drug.

It's approved by the FDA for use in animals as an anesthesia back in 1962.

And then around 1970, they approved it for use with humans.

And it's been used for decades in emergency rooms as in anesthesia.

Patients who'd come in from suicide attempts if they had ketamine as an in a seizure.

Months later, they would find out their suicidality had dropped considerably.

They've realized that ketamine seems to be really effective with depression at this point and also with trauma.

When people experience trauma, a lot of times these the network in the brain of these neural connections start to atrophy, even have MRI scans over time that demonstrate this.

And so basically, the brain is not working as efficiently.

A lot of the pathways start to get closed off, and this stuff helps regrow that and open that up.

Mary Pat: I was sober for 25 years.

I was just loving life.

I was a principal.

Loving school, loving kids loving just everything.

And until I got sick was when I got hooked on all the medications.

They said I was doing too much.

They sent me to a psychiatrist who gave me, you name it, every two weeks.

I'm not talking like ten pills.

I'm talking 30, 60.

I didn't need that.

And the reality was I was very, very physically sick, but they didn't look at it that way.

Sheena: Can I get the Greek book and then I'm going to try and draw something with you?

Or maybe.

One thing that I just couldn't get away from was the physiological sensations that you get in your body when you're really anxious, like a panic attack.

You feel like you're going to die.

You feel like you can't breathe.

Mary Pat: It's that anxiety y-you're you laid in bed and you've already walked through your entire day and you haven't even put your foot on the floor because your brain is constantly going all the time.

Sheena: No talking.

And more than anything else, it was me not wanting to take medication anymore because of the side effects and find a way that I can perhaps dig into other areas of the psyche in a way that I haven't before.

Tim: Ketamine is a little bit different.

That is working on a glutamate transmitter.

And what they're realizing with the glutamate through the research is that it basically keeps the neural circuits locked open and this creates what's called neurogenesis or neuroplasticity.

It's really about accessing past memories and allowing neuronal growth in our brain so our brains actually grow memory chains better.

Therapist: We're in this without too much.

Mary Pat: What it's really helped with is trauma.

It's reconnecting some of the things that I shouldn't have lost.

And also, it closes off the ones that need to be done with.

Sheena: I feel like I've been unlocked.

I'm also able to reach a calm place rather than an interaction that is reactive, especially in tense situations which can happen a lot, especially with a partner or with a child.

You know, it's easier for me to really listen and responding with love and genuine curiosity for How can I be with you right now?

I may not be able to solve this problem for you, but I can be here and support you.

You are going to come in contact with parts of yourself that maybe you didn't know were there.

And we're going to have moments where we're going to have to let go of something maybe we don't want to.

But I realize that I do have the courage to make hard choices.

[Dog Barking] Tim: This is therapeutic work and sometimes it's not always the most comfortable thing.

What I do notice when they come out of it, there's a resilience, an ability to talk about that experience, this really reminiscent of people who have worked through traumas, the point where they can talk about it in their rational mind and not be so overwhelmed by the emotional impact of it, that they then have to repress it, that they can't even face it anymore.

And that's significant.

I mean, that's that's what we want is a goal in therapy is for people to be able to face their histories and manage that.

Because there are some contraindications, hypertension, difficulties with blood pressure.

This might not be the treatment for you because of the health risks.

If there's a history of schizophrenia or psychotic breaks in the family, then we're a little more reticent and we're going to do more thorough exploration, get to know the client better before we administer ketamine to them.

And this is one of the differences between doing this therapeutically and street use of a drug.

We're going to make sure that you have a safe environment that you're going in with the intention of this being healing, because that's going to translate into what kind of experience you have and whether this is an experience that you can tolerate or might be further traumatizing if you don't take these prior steps.

for the next five episodes.

Arizona Illustrated is teaming up with the Southern Arizona chapter of the American Institute of Architects and the Arizona Daily Star to bring you favorite places.

Now in the series, architects speak thoughtfully and personally about why certain destinations are so special to them.

First up is architect Damon Leverett, who discusses the University of Arizona Health Sciences Building and why it's one of his favorite places The University of Arizona's Health Sciences and Innovation Building caught my attention initially because one is easily drawn to its form and placement and in the urban realm, which proudly emerges from the landscape as a nine story building.

Each face of the building is a different combination of materials, glass, concrete, metal, terracotta, thoughtfully, a portion in response to the sun's orientation.

Like a book.

However, the building, as viewed from the outside, represents a cover as only part of the story.

Entering the 245,000 square foot facility, one is greeted by an enormous multi-story space called the forum.

That serves as both an auditorium and a student gathering area.

We see the student centered modality everywhere in the building, porches, lounges, lofts, terraces, all rooms we would be hard pressed to find in a typical institutional building.

Floor spaces are made to be flexible for modification in the future and are flanked by additional study spaces for concentrated work, as well as soft areas for casual contemplation and chance encounters with peers and instructors.

The interior represents how spaces respond to different conditions and programing.

That results in no two floors appearing alike.

There are skylighted offices on the top floor, outdoor student lounges and an amazing grand staircase with this gently designed steps that truly feel easy to climb.

The staircase is an orienting element that is both visually stunning and surprisingly accessible.

The Health Sciences Innovation Building exemplifies the spirit that buildings for the public and more importantly in the education of future generations should reach beyond utilitarian and become prideful spaces for our community and society.

It's design reminds me of the words penned by a young Daniel Patrick Moynihan in his seminal document on federal buildings called Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture.

There he writes about how the buildings which represent our connection with civic society, should be of the finest contemporary American architectural thought.

Exemplified through the dignity, enterprise, vigor and stability of society.

Before we go, here's a sneak peek at a story we're working on.

Charles Mingus remains one of the most influential figures in 20th century American music.

He was born in Nogales, Arizona.

To a father who was a Buffalo soldier stationed at Camp Little in 1922.

He later became known as a virtuoso jazz bass player.

Bandleader and composer.

Although Mingus, his time in Nogales was brief.

His southern Arizona roots remain a sense of pride and celebration for the community.

One day he used the term organized chaos.

So now I'm 21 years old.

I know what chaos means.

I know what organization means.

I'm not quite sure what organized chaos means, but I soon understood what he meant.

Thank you for joining us here on Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara, and we'll see you next week for an all new episode.