Corn and Grapes

The forest

Someone sleeps in this little hut in the vineyard to make sure no one steals the grapes.

Beautiful vineyard view

The week’s adventure continues. On Wednesday I helped pick grapes again. Driving out to a little village of 600 people, my friend Ion told me we were going to take the back way, because the main road to get into the village is really bad, and at times almost impassable. Needless to say, the back way was straight up a mountain, on a horrible dirt road filled with potholes and other tire-blowing surprises. When the rain starts, Ion said, the good road turns into a mudslide and people are forced to take the main road into the village, adding an extra two hours onto the trip. Driving on the roads in Louisiana, which as many of you know can be night and day once you cross the border to another state, seem like a dream compared to here. It’s funny because whenever I take the microbus to Chisinau I usually put my earphones in and take a nap, and every time we pass through a town called Orhei I am startled awake by my head getting smashed against the ceiling because of the potholes in the road. How I look at it though is that if they had good roads here, it just wouldn’t be as fun.

Once we reached the top of the mountain the views were fantastic. The countryside here is beautiful. Looking out at the horizon you can see small clusters of houses and trees that make up different villages, vast open grazing lands for the livestock, acres and acres of farm land accented by freshly tilled earth, rows of grapes, or stacks of corn husks made into tee-pees. We made it early in the morning and first had to harvest a couple acres of corn, by hand. Talk about some bad breaking work, you go through the rows of corn, cut the stalk near the ground with a scythe (if you recall from a previous blog post I was having trouble remembering the word for the slasher tool the Grim Reeper uses), and once that is complete you must remove the husk, and then make giant tee-pees with the stalks, which will be picked up by a horse cart to store for winter which feeds the cows. After we finished the corn we took a break and had a picnic of rabbit, tomatoes, bread, and wine in the shade of an apple tree. I don’t think I’m programmed the same way as the Moldovans, because the old grandpa I was working with seemed to be energized by the wine, but all I wanted to do was take a booze-and-fatigued induced nap in the shade. It probably didn’t help matters that I had killed my water three hours earlier and was pushing the dehydration threshold. My logic at that point was to graze freely on the grapes, and hopefully the fructose and water in the fruit would keep me going.

Harvesting grapes and making wine probably is a lot stickier than you would imagine. You start at the end of a row, and use your knife to cut the bushels off the vine. Every time I would start to get in a groove, and felt like I was really making some headway I would slice my hand open with my knife. Once the baskets were full, we would haul them to the van and pile them in the back on top of a large tarp laid down so as not to get the van dirty since at the bottom a nice layer of juice had formed. Bees swarm to the grapes and I’m really surprised only one of us got stung, because driving down the road we were like a mobile beehive. Of course while driving to the village at the end of the day to drop the grapes off to start the wine making process, the van broke down. I’m no mechanic, and my Romanian is pretty rusty, especially when it comes to technical car parts, but I think the problem was the transmission. I was pretty curious to see how we were going to get out of this pickle, but after banging around the engine with a hammer for ten minutes, we were merrily bumping down the road again.

After my friend Ion and I unloaded the grapes, we had to weigh them, and I believe it came to a little over a ton. We thought we were going to bring the harvest back to Telenesti to sell to a man that owns a bar, so we loaded the grapes back into the van. Well, no dice. The guy didn't want the grapes, so once again, we had to scoop out all the grapes (it was getting really sticky by this point), and carry them a couple hundred yards to the back of the house where a giant barrel was waiting for us to deposit the load. I had been going strong for twelve hours at this point, and was releived when the babusca sat us down at the table to eat borsht, eggs, and a tomato salad.