Harvesting Grapes

I can confirm that rumors of our demise have been greatly exaggerated. Well, mildly, at least. Greatly exaggerated is probably pushing it.

But we are alive, anyway. It's weird. The internet doesn't work for like three or four days and all of a sudden we have multiple emails implying that we've been lost in a fiery explosion, or possibly kidnaped by terrorists. The readers apparently have active imaginations. ´

First, for those of you who have been thinking of us: we got word yesterday that our visas are in, and they're supposed to be in the mail today! Yeah! It even worked out for us to get all four visas without a trip back to Moscow for me, which is a huge plus. Not to mention that our friend of a friend of a friend negotiated a lower price from the embassy so we didn't have to pay as much. Could it get any better? Thanks again for all your thoughts, they had a real impact on our lives this time. There's really no limit to his goodness, is there? We plan to return next week after a quick visit to a future coworker and pick up on our Russian study again.

OK, so on to what we've been doing while we waited: helping with the harvest!

B is turning into quite the photographess! I'm no expert on photo composition, but I really like this one with all the perspective-y stuff and whatnot. Plus, it's cute.

But enough of that. As you'll recall from our last post, we were in Germany waiting for our visas to arrive so we can go back home. What was originally scheduled to be a brief 10-day stop has turned into a 25-day stop. As I've mentioned, we finally have heard that everything is finalized, but our poor family here have had to put up with us for quite a while now.

I want you to imagine that some distant relatives who you've only seen twice in your life call you up and ask if they can stay with you for 10 days while they get some paperwork processed. OK, you think to yourself, we can put up with their two small children for that long. We can move one of our boys out of his room to give them a place to stay, and we'll even pick them up from the train station.

Now imagine that your visitors' paperwork hits some snags, requiring them to stay with you for almost a month. A month of screaming children at the dinner table, a son living in another room, etc. This will give you some idea of what my poor family has been through. And they've been great about it, even though it's their busiest time of the year!

Naturally, we've tried to help out as much as possible while we're here to lessen the burden of our unexpected stay. Since they are farmers, this has meant putting in time in the apple orchards and vineyards, where we've been most days for the last 3 weeks. And so, in case this situation ever happens to you, I have prepared an introductory course on grape-picking for the readers:

The first, and most time-consuming portion of the grape-harvesting process, is the picking of the grapes. As with seemingly all fruit farmng, the critical thing in grapes is sugar content. When the grapes are totally ripe, the sugar content is at it's highest, meaning you can make better wine and therefore more money.

Grapes, apparently, are Democrats. I had always thought that grapes were "purple," at least the non-white ones, but it turns out there are many shades of purple. Basically, the bluer the better, so as you snip off the clusters to put in your bucket, you want nice blue ones like those pictured above.

These grapes are too red. In this case, you need to throw them out. Just snip them out of the bunch and throw them onto the ground. Of course, you're standing on a near-cliff, so I would suggest throwing it somewhere you've already worked so it doesn't make you slip as you work.

There are several kinds of things that afflict ripe grapes, and the most common is shown here. It's a sort of mold, I guess, and the internet calls it "bunch rot." It usually forms on the inside of a large bunch. Most of the time, you'll find that part of the bunch is OK and part is rotten, so just snip off the rotten grapes and pitch them, the rest is perfectly fine.

A lot of grapes are grown on really steep hillsides. These hillsides offer two advantages. One: you can grow some kinds of grapes only on steep slopes, and these kinds are apparently in higher demand and make better wine. Second: the German organization that controls the production of wine has a limit on how many liters you can make per hectare, and the amount is higher on a sloped hectare (it makes sense if you think about it - on a slope you actually have more surface area for vines per hectare, which are measured straight across).

Serious grape farmers (as opposed to hobbyists, of which there are many here) run tracks up the slope, which they can then use to move this machine up and down the slope. We poured our buckets of grapes into white boxes, which were then loaded onto a device like this one for transport to the tractor.

In relatively flat vineyards, or places where there is no track, someone will strap on this contraption and walk down to where the pickers are. Then, 4 or 5 buckets are poured into the pack, and he hauls it to the tractor manually. I found this picture on the internet, so it's not someone we know, but I think you get the idea of the "grape backpack."

B missed most of the grape-harvesting, since it was too steep to bring the kids, but she did manage to get them out here one day when we worked on a flatter vineyard. You know what they say: The family that picks grapes together, stays together. Or something like that.

OK, so we have lots of other pictures of the fall colors here and the boys being cute, but since those are B's specialty, I'll let her post them on another post. Maybe we can get our videos to cooperate and we'll put a few of them up next post as well. For now, choos (I'm sure my German readers will be disappointed with that spelling, but it's how it sounds) and hopefully we'll get back to this blog in a shorter period this time.

Oh, and, back by popular demand, we'll end with a What Is It™. This sign is commonly seen around these parts. Can you guess what it means?