It's Wine Time!

This is the time of year when families pick their grapes and start producing home-made wine. I have never tasted as delicious of wine as I have here in Moldova. The flavor is fresh and goes down easy. I would venture to say it is a little bit more potent than the supermarket variety. If you are lucky, you will be a guest at a house where the wine is completely natural. This means that nothing was added to the grapes in the process of making wine. No water, no sugar…just grapes. My host family makes natural wine, and I am quick to point out to guests that what they are drinking is straight from the earth. No wine in America that you find in the supermarket or wine store can claim theirs is homemade.
So we head to our garden in the back and begin filling buckets upon buckets with grapes. I ask if there is a special process or selection and they tell me “no, everything.” So everything goes into the wine. The small grapes, the withered grapes, the stems, the bunches, it all goes in. Of course, we don’t fill our buckets with the grape leaves, because that would just be silly. In about two hours, the grape vines in the garden are barren. All the grapes get sent through this sifter type device that is a wooden box sitting on top of the enormous wooden wine barrel. As we dump the grapes in, my host dad begins cranking the sifter, which mashes the grapes, coaxing out all the juices. I get the honors of climbing on top of the shed to collect the grapes from the vines on top of the shed and surrounding the house. This requires several positions, sitting, kneeling, squatting, standing, lunging, as the vines are low and tangley. By this time, my hands are covered in grape particles and grape juices. I am quite certain my hair is matted down with grapeness and the bees have named me their queen by the looks of all of them swarming around me.
After the barrel is full of squished grape bunches it is covered and allowed to sit and marinate and ferment a bit. Within three or so days, depending on the weather, you have wine. But it is “new wine” which means it is not fully fermented and still contains a little bit of bacteria. As volunteers, we are not encouraged to drink “new wine” unless we want to be ill and camp out in the outhouse. But as the wine was pouring out of the barrel and into the barrel where it will finish fermenting, I couldn’t help but take a taste. “New wine” is very tasty and resembles grape juice with a kick. I had a glass and savored it. Hours later and I still feel fine. I escaped the clutches of the “new wine” monster. Now I will have to wait a few weeks and/or months to taste this year’s wine. Happy Drinking!