Skip to main content

It's just not romantic

I've never been grape picking before, not had the wanderlust need to fly to Oz and pick grapes with a lot of gap-year students and a couple of old hippies.  But when the grape harvesting season started recently in Portugal I started to feel the need to snip some grapes and become part of the wine making process.

So instead of the lush vineyards of Bordeaux or the stunning landscape of the Douro wine region in Portugal nor the far off general loveliness of Stellenbosch we plumped for Avelar.  Not somewhere (although it pains me to say it) where you would really go for a romantic image of grape picking, complete with wine lodge and Keanu Reeves (if you've never seen A Walk in the Clouds you won't get that).   No, Avelar has a good bakery, a hospital, a car show room and is the home of João, whose father in laws grapes we were about to pick.

Now, I do have to say that my knowledge of grape picking does come from the afore mentioned film - A Walk in the Clouds - a romantic image of a family picking grapes, living for the vine, large lunches under the sun, using your feet to crush the grapes and Sideways another wine film, but this includes men reaching a mid-life crisis, alcoholism and having a mental breakdown, so not something to aspire to.  Alas, grape picking in Avelar is a little more perfunctionary!

a)  As normal with things Portuguese, I seem to be the only girl

 
b)  I'm grape picking with car-mechanics not Keanu

c) It's September and it's still bloomin' hot

d) No one, and I mean no one told it, it's really hard work and there are spiders!
e) Wine no longer crushed by the feet, but through a machine

f) Wine in a vat, starting to ferment looks a bit gross (not quite enough to put me off for life)



However, having said all that we did have a lovely time, got a good lunch and went home with lots of grapes and two massive jugs of last years 'vintage' so it can't all be bad eh!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Building our Barrel Vault Wood Fired Oven

This is a short description of my barrel vault build that I have done here in Central Portugal. The final internal size is a 1m squared floor with a arch height of 50cm. I hope you enjoy and get some ideas from it. I wish to thank ukwoodfiredovenforum  for their advice and support. • 1: First I dug out a hole in the flower bed, on top of the stone wall, where the oven was to be built • 2: Set up a form to pour in the concrete base • 3: Pour the concrete base, which was about 5-6 inches deep • 4: On top of the base I cast 4-5 inches of LECA (light weight expanded clay balls) mixed with cement to hold it's form • 5: Then I cast a 2-3 inch heat retaining base, to add to the thermal mass, using calcium aluminate cement with large grain sand, as a flat base for the hearth bricks to sit on • 6-8: I then dry laid the hearth bricks on a dry bed of fine sand and clay mixture, with th...

oh what a lovely bougainvillea

It was something I wanted to grow, a plant which would cover the wall, give shade, give colour and really stamp the fact we lived abroad.   Bougainvillea. We have the other Mediterranean type of plants growing; we have olives in abundance, we have the grapes thriving, we have the figs establishing, but alas no bougainvillea.    I looked up how to grow it and it says:   Bougainvillea thrives in full sun.   “At least 5 hours a day of direct sunlight is the minimal light required for good bloom. More hours of direct sun are better. Less than 5 hours and the plant may not bloom very well.”   5 hours of sun ‘check’, good light ‘check’, south facing ‘check’….but alas the Med we are not!   This little peak of Central Portugal has cold air in winter (snow even), a vigorous breeze at dusk and is prone to a late frost.   Our courtyard is just too exposed to the elements, there is no little ‘nook’ for a bougainvillea, there is no wall for it to climb...

Chestnuts and Saints

St. Martinho or St. Martin of Tours, became the first non-  martyr  saint to receive official church worship and became one of the most popular saints in medieval Europe. (Source wikipedia). His feast day is 11 November, deep into autumn and the chestnut season. In Portugal, as it's chestnut season 'Magustos'are celebrated in St. Martinho's name. A magusto is a group  of friends and/or family who get together and bake and eat chestnuts.  We have our village magusto at the weekend.  Meanwhile at home I've been celebrating the chestnut instead of the saint.  This 'celebration' involves collecting the chestnut harvest, splitting, cooking and shelling hundreds of these shiny brown chestnuts. Well, there's not much else to do on a wet Monday in these hills. Now I've got a bowl full of chestnuts I'm looking for recipes.  Here's what I've tried so far: Chestnut cake.  Made by using blitzed chestnuts instead of regular flo...