Fete des Vendanges Russin

Hey, hey, hey! after months of silence on the blog front I've finally found a free minute to sit down and post something. I know, I know all my fans will be ecstatic! er...wait...what fans? Anywho, here's a little bit about the Fete des Vendanges (the Harvest Festival) held in Russin, Switzerland that we attend this weekend. I'd heard of this festival before, but had never managed to get there. Then when I was looking up different wine festivals, in order to tempt my sister and brother-in-law to come visit next September I stumbled upon it again- and we actually made it there!

we went with some friends who had never been either. We took a rather long way to get there since we missed the road we were supposed to turn on (thanks mapman!) Eventually, we got to just outside the town and discovered that the road was blocked. We parked at a church and kept our fingers crossed no one would care and started walking. We heard a band and followed the music. The road started winding up the hillside and we all sighed when we realized we'd have to trek all the way to the top to get to the festival. We kept telling ourselves it was just good exercise to prepare us for all the yummy food we'd get at the festival. We passed vineyards full of lovely grapes, hanging there just beckoning for us to pick them. Not really the best photo...but what can you expect I wanted to get to the food and wine!

Russin, the town where the festival was held, was packed with people. Kids with balloons, parents with bottles of wine, or glasses of Mout.

Sadly, we missed the 22 Yodelers who had performed that morning, but we were in time to catch the tail end of a parade with floats. My favorite was the float full of full-grown Smurfs (or schtroumpfs as they are known in French) and a giant Schtroumpf house! Loved it. It made me laugh when the people covered in blue make-up saw a friend and would jump off the float and give the obligatory 3 kisses (les bises) leaving their friends faces smudged with blue! OK, so we really only saw 2 floats, but we followed the smurfs along and they led us to one of the best parts of the festival. A big flat-bed filled with crates of different varieties of grapes there for the taking. We each grabbed a bunch of grapes and chowed down.


Oh they were so yummy! It's amazing how sweet some of them are considering the wine that they produce. Here's a photo of the Doc trying to decide which type of grape he should grab a bunch of. He went down the whole line sampling every single type until he found the one he wanted to carry around with him. My choice was the Syrah. Not only do I like the wine, I also like the Syrah grapes!

Also in the same place was the famous Mout. The very first pressing of the grapes with absolutely NOTHING added to it. Just pure grape juice. No alcohol, no sugar. It was interesting. Nothing like what we would think of as grape juice and nothing like wine. It had a bit of an aftertaste and was quite sweet, but not too bad. The hubbster liked it quite a bit - then again, it was sweet so of course he liked it. hee, hee.
We around through the crowds exploring the festival. We watched some dancers all decked out in traditional garb dancing near a giant milk can.

I don't know if you can really see the dancers in the photo amongst the crowd. They had green hats trimmed in red on.

there were also your typical fair games and rides for the kiddies. One that we particularly liked and debated whether is would be allowed in the US or UK these days (such litigious societies), was this sort of swing. The kids would stand up in the center of it and bend their legs to make it swing higher and higher. It was started off by some guy pushing them, of course. It was great. I SO wanted to do it. Sadly, I was too old and too big for them. Besides, I'd rather throw my money away on food and drink rather than purchasing over priced ride tickets, know what I mean?

Anyways, it was good fun. we had some good food - Tartiflette - so we didn't really branch out there, since we know we love Tartiflette. Ah, it's getting to be good, cool autumnal weather. Perfect for warm comfort foods like Tartiflette, fondue, and all the other cheese heavy Swiss/French dishes that are so common to this area.

Well goodness, this post has taken me ages. Now I remember why I hadn't done one in some time. If I don't get a move on we won't eat dinner till 10pm! Later gators.

Wine Tasting Party

First off, I just have to give props where they are due. I am married to most giving man ever. I can't believe how willingly he goes along with my craziness. Just one example. Last Tuesday night as we sat around eating dinner and talking about my upcoming birthday I suddenly decided I wanted to have a party. Not just any party, a wine tasting party. My head was teaming with ideas, all of which would cause tons of work for me (and the hubbster) during the week. Instead of telling me I was crazy for planning an elaborate last minute birthday celebration he went along with it and helped me make it work. Now, this might not be all that impressive to you, but on top of being supportive of my last minute birthday wishes, which meant extra work for him, he also had a killer week at work. He leaves tomorrow for Florence where he will be giving a talk at a conference so he has been working like a madman to get himself prepared. And I unkindly dump my plans to have a party straight into his lap. What a good guy!

So, anyways the party was a great success. Naturally, I forgot to take any pictures at all. I'll have to photograph the massive amount of empty wine bottles and an example of how the blind tasting went. I made little bags for the wine bottles labeled A, B, & C so we had multiple rounds of tasting. Each person brought a bottle of wine - actually, many people even brought 2 so there was plenty of wine to be had. I had made up slips of paper so you could mark down your impressions of each wine. We did the Sight, Sniff, Swig tasting method. You looked at the color of the wine ( I usually wrote something very insightful like, It's red or It's white) then we swirled it around stuck our schnoz down in the glass and took a big sniff. I could never describe the aroma. Mostly it just smelled like wine to me. Then we took a swig and this is where the descriptions got interesting. One wine was described as tasting like cow pee. How one might know what that tastes like is better left unasked. The funniest part was the person who wrote that it tasted of cow pee was the person who brought that very wine! ha, ha, the joke was on him!

Not only were my guests expected to faithfully fill out their wine cards, I also forced them to play games. During different rounds of tasting you had to figure out what region the wine came from, or the varietal. It was good fun. Being experts at tasting wine (snort, giggle) we all took wild guesses. I did make it easier by saying, "OK, there are 3 wines here. One is a local French wine, one is a Californian wine, and one is a Bulgarian wine. Guess which is which." It was fun. If you guessed the most correctly you won a prize. I had a grab bag full of wrapped prizes. I had a laugh picking out the cheapest, cheesiest things I could. There was a plastic soccer whistle, alien shaped erasers, a giggle stick, a cow in a can (when you turned it over it mooed like a cow - one of my favorites), 6 tiny, pink, Cinderella yoyos...tons of junk like that. You can imagine how excited people were when they won!

I also made everyone take a wine quiz and write their own wine notes - which were then read aloud. some of them were hysterical. I'll have to look around and see if I have any left. one said, this wine pairs perfectly with stale Christmas candy and post-Christmas orgasms. What more could one ask for in a wine?

By the end of the evening I had drank a wee too much wine and fell asleep on the couch. Thankfully everyone except our upstairs neighbor was gone so they didn't witness this embarrassing display of my lack of restraint when it comes to drinking wine. I think a wine tasting party is definitely something we should do again...only next time I won't be the server, which resulted in me pouring myself a glass of wine approximately every 5-10 minutes. Yeah, that might have been the problem.

anyhoo, I think everyone had a good time, I know I did and I'm the birthday girl so in the end that's all that matters -right?

Will Write for Wine

My friend, Berni, mentioned this podcast to me and I decided I should check it out...and I am SO glad that I did. I absolutely am in LOVE with Lani and Sam the novelists who do this podcast. They are absolutely hysterical as well as passing along great advice about writing and discovering your unique talents. I have no intentions of writing a book or anything, but i thoroughly enjoy listening to them.

It's also fun to hear about the wines they are drinking - they each have a different bottle of wine during each podcast. Sam likes good wine and Lani likes anything that is $10 or under. OK, well she does consider wine in a box swill. And to all you Boones Farm drinkers out there I don't really think that can be considered real wine - sorry!

Listening to them has made me want to start trying all the different wines around here. You can get some great bottles for extremely cheap - 5 Euros which, at the current exchange rate, is about $8 U.S. So, not terrible. Perhaps I should start reviewing the wines we drink here....now that's a thought. At least that way I'd have some personal record of wines we liked and didn't like as opposed to our current method which is: Me: "Wow! this is a great wine. We should get it again some time." DH:" Definitely. We'll have to remember it for when we have guests." Then we recycle the bottle and forget about it until we have company coming and we say, "ooh, what was that really good wine we had?" " You know the one we got from that store...like 3 weeks ago...the white one...what was that?" Neither one of us can remember so we end up getting something untried. Oh well.

so, i hurt mt arm in some mysterious way and am having trouble typing with a bag of frozen veggies resting on it...so I'm going to go now.