I once mentioned grape harvest in my blog and I think it would be in order for me to tell you about it. So we have a wine yard with a nice weekend house beside it. We make 1000 liters of wine every year, it's not that it would be cheaper than buying it, but it's for the sake of tradition and the love. The grape harvest is not considered as work, we all love it: I usually attend 4 harvests per year. Would love to go to more but they take place in the same range of time (in two weeks) and all on weekends when people don’t have to go to work.
A day or two before the harvest me and my mother start preparing the food, baking all sorts of pastries, getting the food together, while my dad and my boyfriend go to the weekend house and prepare containers for young wine.
At 9 am on the H day all the relatives and friends come. When they arrive each gets some hard liquor to start a day. Then we have a huge breakfast together, but we don’t eat breakfast food we eat all sorts of sausages, ham, cheese, pickles, salads, pastries.
Then we are off to the wine yard, we go downhill and pick grapes uphill. Whenever our buckets are full we would yell for pütar (that is a guy that carries püta - a big bucket on his shoulders). He takes the grapes to the wine press where they are turned to sweet young wine. When grape pickers come all the way uphill they eat and drink some, chill a little and then back down. Our wine yard is small so we get uphill only twice and then it’s lunch time. 
We eat beef broth with noodles, then wiener schnitzels, chicken, beef, pork, salads with pumpkin oil, potatoes. At the end we get coffee and with the pastry, it the time for women to proudly present our backing skills. I make Swiss rolls, peachy cookies, and some fancy cakes with cool names that would mean nothing to you if I put them down. My mom makes potica (cake consisting of a sheet of pastry spread with a rich filling (nuts and raisins)) and a cake with vanilla pudding, cream and chocolate. My aunts also bring some cool pastries but again it’s meaningless to explain you’d have to be there. And we sit, eat, drink and talk for 3 or 4 hours, then people start leaving. The rest of us wash the dishes that 40 people have left behind (by hands). When finished we take it easy, watch the sunset and wait for the wine to be pressed. When the night comes some friends who couldn’t make it before come and drink with us, my boyfriend prepares chestnut and the clock soon turns to late evening when we - too drunk to drive - fall asleep in uncomfortable bed. Labels: eating, fall, harvest |
Be careful, with all that good food you might become round like a grape ... and then you either get pressed or gobbled up ... yumm, yumm!