My earliest memory of school lunch is butter and honey sandwiches. Peanut butter is not a food category in Macedonian households. Salty peanuts are a welcome snack, not a paste. Salted butter, on the other hand, pairs perfectly with honey. Our butter of choice growing up in Metro Detroit in the 1970s was obviously Land O’ Lakes. I’d anxiously eyeball my mom as she unwrapped the waxed parchment and layered cold, crinkled shards of what seemed like half a stick to my small eyes onto thick homemade bread. From experience I knew the butter would soften by lunchtime. The molasses-colored chestnut honey from my great-grandfather’s old village beehives drizzled over the top would eventually drip into the crevices of the bread and slowly onto my fingers as I took the first bite. The honey was the prize. We stowed away reused Fanta soda bottles filled with this liquid gold in our suitcases, wrapped like dynamite for their bumpy flight to Michigan. Once back in suburbia, each spoonful was allocated like threads of saffron.

I still have a few jars of this honey tucked away in the cupboard, given as an heirloom by my grandmother Babi. I’ve eaten this honey my entire life – it predates me. It is raw, unfiltered purity at its finest. It has never crystalized or solidified. If it was carbon dated, it would likely register 70+ years old. I remember as a kid in my aunt’s house watching her begrudgingly open the lid to the 60-gallon drum of honey in her cellar to ladle some out for us. Even as a young child I knew she was stingy. As the only sibling of my grandmother’s two sisters who didn’t emigrate to the United States, she guarded the honey as she did the deeds to the family’s properties – with distrust. While Macedonians may not eat peanut butter, they have an equitable inheritance code. Everyone gets their fair share. Though as the one who stayed, she was confident she deserved a tiny bit more.

This aunt lived a charmed life married to a beloved children’s doctor who treated everyone with empathy and kindness. He saw patients no one else would, and didn’t distinguish between ethnicity, religion, class or wealth in this historically divided society. Mothers would sheepishly approach his front door in emergencies with their sick children when he wasn’t at the hospital. One late summer afternoon as I was chalking the driveway for hopscotch, a mother carrying her frail child clung to the front gate, scarcely able to hold herself up from grief. She and her child were barefoot. My uncle spotted her from the kitchen window and rushed out with his leather doctor’s bag. He examined the child on the front steps, filled a needle with fluid, and injected a shot in his arm. Speaking in tender tones, he discreetly pressed a tiny jar into the mother’s hand and carefully escorted them on their way. When my uncle died years later, in an exceptional show of unity, Macedonians, Albanians, Roma, and Turks all gathered for his funeral procession that stretched for miles.

It was in his home where I began to challenge the existing framework of centuries old ethnic issues. During my earliest recollection at age five, it was this aunt, his wife, who yanked us back by our shirttails as we were running out the door in Tetovo to join the rowdy bunch playing ball in the street. “Whatever you do,” she warned harshly, “don’t play with the Albanian kids.” She didn’t want us American kids embarrassing her. Back in Michigan we played with everyone in the schoolyard. Now, we were confused, fearing her indignation. As an adult looking back this isn’t surprising. This was the same woman who casually told the story of how she stashed cookies away in the cupboard. By all glowing accounts, even mine, she was a wonderful cook. She had two growing boys who voraciously consumed everything she baked before she could enjoy a fallen crumb. This time, she hid three cookies for herself. The boys came in and devoured the bounty. She forgot all about her secret stash. Weeks later she returned to the cupboard to find a plate of moldy fuzz.

I know she isn’t solely to blame for the way she made us feel. For centuries in the Balkans everyone from all ethnic and religious groups have behaved the same. She just splattered it in stark contrasts. An Albanian family no sooner wanted their children playing with Macedonian kids, or worse, marrying one. Blood feuds are real. Yet, to me, all I saw was the gray matter connecting everyone together. The similarities were glaring, not the differences. This legacy of fear created a system of blindness. People only saw what they didn’t have, not the plenty to be shared with others.

This moment has stayed with me ever since. My Fulbright Scholarship in 1998 to Macedonia was formulated as result. My whole life I kept asking, “Why can’t we get along?” The answer was, “That’s just the way it is.” I wanted to understand after centuries of ethnic and religious strife within this nascent democratic system, as Yugoslavia broke apart in the early 1990s, if the youth yearned for a new way. I was naïve for a 26-year-old, and perhaps I still am. Through my years of research, I discovered people didn’t believe they had the agency to change. The examples had to come from the top. Most importantly, cultural constraints were, and remain, a potent force against any transformation. Anyway, who am I to think I have an answer for world peace? Going around provoking an ideal that has never existed anywhere? Hoping people will give their cookies away and trusting the immediate sacrifice will be worth it in the end? To what end?

That aunt, my beloved grandmother’s sister, accused me of being an American spy during my first year of research in Macedonia. She tried to convince everyone in the family. My grandmother even called me from Detroit. Why else would I be interviewing and spending extensive time in public with Macedonians, Albanians, Turks, and Roma all over the country under the auspices of “research”? Her friends were whispering. She told me the local police questioned her. After going to the station to find the officer, I interrupted him mid-sentence and told him if he had an issue with me interviewing willing participants in plain view he should speak to the U.S. Embassy. I left her house and never returned

I joke that the reason I make wine today is my failure to design a template to solve world peace. It’s not that farfetched if you believe the trajectory of life is not a straight line. It’s the paths that crisscross along the creeks and meander into the hills. The ones that lead to my grandmother’s table with hot whiskey in hand, and my dad’s family’s apple orchard along the cobblestoned street. It’s the transcendent flavors of history, memory, fallibility, and love in each spoonful of my great grandfather’s honey. The stories of immigration. And my aunt’s rotten cookies. On my last research trip to Macedonia in 2003 my dad joined me. An avid reader of the newspaper every morning, he remained active in Macedonian politics both in the U.S and in Macedonia. They say you can’t teach charm. Since birth he’s had it in spades. He knew everyone. He once gave a speech during a political rally after 9/11 in Macedonia’s capital Skopje (the country today is called North Macedonia) that was titled “Hand in Hand” evoking the ideal of partnership and brotherhood. On this trip we had lunch with the President, dinners with leading political figures and drinks with professors and journalists. For someone like me with insatiable curiosity, I soaked it all in. During our remaining days, we stayed in his family’s home where he grew up. We loved to walk the open pastures in the late afternoon filling our pockets with ripe fruit languishing in trees. For the first time, after all our visits over the years since I was a child, we walked up the hill where his father planted their vineyard. It hadn’t been tended to for decades and vines were still growing out of the ground. On our flight home we sketched a plan to one day replant that old vineyard.

Soon after I returned to California, I had a random opportunity to help plant a backyard vineyard. This was my foundation, I thought, to realize that dream. And the rest, as they say, is history.

— Sonja Magdevski