№4 — Wine harvesting
Autumn is wine time — thus this week’s new experience is again a wine based one. Since I was travelling during my birthday last week, I met my parents and my sister together with Silia in the tiny, yet very beautiful town of Langenlois in Lower Austria to harvest some wine and celebrate my birthday.
We joined the winery Nastl who welcomed us with a glass of Sturm (grape juice that already started fermenting) and some very interesting insights into the wine business before we hiked for 15 minutes to get to their vineyards.
Once we reached the vineyards together with the other helping hands — we were about 30 people including us — we got a quick introduction to grape harvesting. It is surprisingly easy: take garden scissors, cut off grapes and throw them into a bucket. When the buckt is full, dump the grapes into the tractor’s trailer. Rinse and repeat until trailer is full.
It took us about an hour to fill the trailer, which amounted to roughly 1200 kilograms of grapes. After the initial harvest, we could strengthen ourselves with a Sausemmel, before walking back to witness the rest of the wine production.
We watched as the grapes were deliverd and dumped into the squeezer, who did the rest of the work for us. We could also try the fresh grape juice before it was transferred into tanks for fermentation.
After this very exhausting step we were rewarded at the Nastl Heuriger with a wine tasting of nine different white wines, ranging in age from 2015 to 1992. Finally, we enjoyed a very tasty dinner with local delicacies, which rounded off the day.
It was a really nice experience and I was surprised how much fun it actually is. However, I can imagine that it gets boring pretty soon once you take away the fun parts (eating and drinking) and add multiple weeks of continious harvest. Nevertheless, if you are interested in this sort of thing, check out their website in August if such an event is coming up again.
Click here to see my list of past experiences and ideas what to do next. If you have a suggestion for future new experiences, feel free to comment or drop me a message.
