19/06/2026
🌱 Roots & Routes: Nourishing Diasporic Food Entrepreneurship
This Saturday (20th June) University of Exeter , together with Olia Hercules and Vadym Granovskiy , are bringing Roots & Routes, a one-day celebration of food, culture and community at Exeter College (Hele Road Site). Inspired by Olia’s memoir Strong Roots, the event brings together diasporic food entrepreneurs, chefs, makers and cultural practitioners from across the South West, starting with Ukrainian food traditions and branching out into Hong Kong, West African, Syrian, Kurdish and other diasporic communities.
Expect storytelling, hands-on skills sessions and a brilliant makers’ marketplace; all about sharing food heritage, building connections, and helping food businesses thrive. 🍲✨
📍 Exeter College, Hele Road Site 🗓️ Sat 20 June | 10:00–18:00
To mark the occasion, we’ll be opening a selection of wines by the glass at the shop over the weekend, all made from heritage grapes; some indigenous varieties nearly lost to history, kept alive by small peasant communities who never stopped growing them. The star of the lineup is Nour by Heya Wines (Co-ferments) in Lebanon. Heya Wines is a natural wine project founded by Claudine Lteif and Michelle Chami, two friends building a female-led winery with an all-women vineyard team and a minimal-intervention, native-yeast approach to winemaking. Nour is a direct pressed blend of rare native grape Obeideh with Grenache Blanc from the Bekaa Valley, fermented naturally and aged in Lebanese amphorae before bottling without anything added or taken away. Named after the Arabic word for light, it’s a wine born from resilience and hope, crafted during a time of profound turmoil in Lebanon.
