Showing posts with label grapes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label grapes. Show all posts

Thursday, November 28, 2019

Sour grapes?

I never particularly cared for Bohemian Rhapsody, or Queen come to that. For years and years though the British people, in polls no more dubious than the Catalan referendum, voted Bohemian Rhapsody the best song of all time or some such accolade. In Spain that same sort of listing goes to a song called Mediterráneo by Joan Manuel Serrat. Last Saturday some bloke I was having lunch with asked me if I'd ever heard the song. I controlled my snort and answered his patronising question almost civilly.

He was an anaesthetist, I think the woman with him was a surgeon. There were five other people, including us, on the table and one of those people, a bloke we'd known for fewer than three hours, bought lunch for everyone on the table in an outstandingly generous gesture.

We'd met the bill payer and his two pals in a car park in Novelda as we waited to do a tour of the vineyards that produce eating grapes, uvas de mesa, in this little bit of Alicante province.

The wind was blowing, it looked like rain. Of the 23 people signed up for the tour only five of us actually turned up. Our future benefactor and his two pals went in one car and we went in the vineyard owner's BMW along with the tour organiser.

Spaniards seem to prefer their green grapes with seeds. One particularly famous seeded variety is aledo; the grape traditionally eaten alongside the midnight chimes that ring in the New Year. All the eating grapes we saw were protected from birds, beasties and the elements by wrapping them in what look like paper bags as they grow on the vine. This time of year, the run up to Christmas and the New Year, is a big time for picking - possibly because of the popping them into your mouth as the chimes ring out thing - but that could be a bit of chicken and egg type reasoning. One of the various stories to explain the twelve grapes tradition of the Spanish New Year has the grape growers of the past, faced with a huge glut of grapes at Christmastime, coming up with the cunning plan of promoting their fruit for the New Year. Do Britons choose to eat sprouts as a Christmas accompaniment or is it simply that there was very little option in the dead of a British winter?

So we got the tour. I understood it perfectly. We saw the forms of "trellises", we heard why hand picking was the only way, we learned  about the seedless varieties, with pink skins and red leaves grown under nets for the British market and lots lots more. But that was a week ago. All the fine detail has now drained from my overtaxed and withered mind.

The bit that I do remember, and the thing that surprised me most, was the next bit. The vineyard owner drove us to a shed just off the La Romana-Novelda road, by the turn down to Aspe. It's hardly a centre of population. Inside the shed there were well over 100 people  working at a cracking pace to prepare the fruit for market. They cut off leaves, discarded damaged grapes, packed the fruit in variously named boxes for different supermarket chains and then carted the boxes to waiting lorry trailers or piled them into the cold store. It was a very slick operation carried out to a stridently upbeat and very Spanish musical soundtrack.

And to finish off we went to a bodega that grew the other sort of grapes, the ones that people ferment into alcohol. That's where we met the man who paid for our lunch and the medic who thought that after fifteen years in Spain it was surprising that I'd heard a Spanish song.

Wednesday, September 05, 2018

Horny handed sons and daughters of toil

There are all sizes of tractors. Probably the most common around here are really old, really beaten up and quite small tractors. Think of a tractor the size of a 1950s Massey Ferguson, the sort of tractor Peter Rabbit's Mr. McGregor would have, if he'd had a tractor. They use them in the vineyards where there is just about space for them to manoeuvre, they use them to haul trailers full of grapes to the local bodega, they use them for the almonds and to go to the bar. A couple of days ago four big tractors roared past the front of our house followed by a medium sized tractor hauling a trailer. They were going to pick almonds. I know because the tractors each had one of the umbrella like nets at the back which are fastened around the tree trunk whilst the tree is given a good shaking. Sherlock Holmes wise I could also deduce that they may well be picking almonds because, when I passed the industrial estate the other day, I could hear the machines working and see the mountains of almond shells in the yard. Oh, and when we were eating outside the village hall on Sunday a tractor and trailer rig went by and nearly everybody there shouted encouragement to the farmer. I could see almonds in the trailer.

Pinoso is rural, it's surrounded by lots of small villages and by vineyards, wheat fields, almond and olive groves and goodness knows what else. And that's the thing. Those people in the village, at the meal, who urged the farmer on, knew what he was harvesting and my guess is that they usually know what's been harvested because they have friends or family involved. I don't. Some things are obvious, the grapes for instance, and maybe peaches or cherries but there are plenty of fields with green things in them. They could be artichokes or peas or peppers or melons or potatoes or onions or aubergines. I may be able to tell close up but I can't guess from as I see the workers stooped over, picking by hand, or the tractors going to and fro.

We have farmers as a near neighbours. They have plenty of kit, sometimes though, for things like big combines or the mechanised grape picking, they hire it in. They work all hours. They work the fields under artificial light quite often. Yesterday evening a tractor started ploughing up the field, which has been fallow for three or four years, directly opposite our house. They finished, I think, though to be honest I'd stopped paying much attention to the noise by then, around 10pm. I'd suspect they stopped to go home for the evening meal. They started again well before first light, around 4.30am.

But why have they ploughed up the field and why was it so urgent? I don't like not knowing that sort of thing.

Friday, January 01, 2016

Underwear, grapes and bubbly

I missed out on the red underwear last night. I forgot all about it. Blue and grey I think. And when I was looking for some background on the underwear I came across another New Year's tradition that I didn't know about. It makes sense though and ties in with a famous Christmas TV ad. And, of course, the grapes, the grapes.

Anne Igartiburu and Ramón García were last nights presenters as the camera focused on the clock tower of the 18th-century Real Casa de Correos in Madrid's Puerta del Sol. Numbers in the square were limited for the first time ever. Just 25,000 people. The ball in the tower slides down, the clock begins with the quarter chimes - not yet, not yet — a pause then the twelve chimes. On each chime we have to pop a grape into our mouth. One for each month of the year. The grapes have pips. The grapes, well nearly all of them, come from near us from the valley of the Vinalopó. Eat them all before the bell tolls fade away and you will have good luck for the year.

The story goes that the tradition of the grapes is a marketing ploy invented by the wily grape growers of Alicante after they had a bumper harvest about a century ago. There are other stories that tie the tradition to rich people from Madrid copying a French fad. Whatever the origins the lucky grapes - las uvas de la suerte - are now as symbolic of New Year as Auld Lang Syne is to Britons.

The typical grapes are white Aledo grapes which are harvested in late November and December. They are protected by Denominación de Origen or D.O. status which means that there are specific rules about how the grapes can be grown and harvested. When buds first form in June and July they are wrapped in paper bags and kept covered as they ripen. Originally this was done to keep off a plague of moths but nowadays the growers say it maintains the flavour and concentrates the aroma of the grapes as well as slowing down their maturation.

We had proper grapes this year because we were in a restaurant and they supplied them but sometimes, when we've not been sure where we are going to end up at midnight we have taken the precaution of buying a small can of ready peeled, de-pipped grapes so that we are ready when the time comes.

We should have been wearing red underwear too and to do it right the underwear should have been given by someone else. I've heard it said that this is a general good luck charm and that the tradition started because red was such a vibrant life affirming colour. Nowadays it's often associated with good luck in love. I'd have thought that might have had more to do with underwear being removed.

Grapes for general luck, underwear for luck in love and gold for luck in things financial. After eating the grapes, Spaniards, and Britons in Spanish company, generally drink cava, the sparkling wine most of which is produced in Catalunya. Apparently we should drop something gold into the glass of bubbly, drink the entire glassful in one go and retrieve the gold to assure our financial success in the coming year. The Freixenet Cava telly ad always features lots of gold

We didn't get a cotillón in the restaurant. A cotillón is a a fun bag with party poppers, paper hats and suchlike. I only mention it here because I was amused by the name for the thing that has a curled tube of paper that flicks out and screeches when you blow into the mouthpiece. I don't know if we have a consistent name for them in English as my Googling produced party horn, screamer, tweeter, squeaker and noise-maker but in peninsular Spanish they are called matasuegras - mother in law killers. Ho, Ho.

Happy New Year.

Friday, October 09, 2015

September weather

The blogs about the weather are amongst the posts that get most visits. So I've been looking out for the July and August summaries on the Town Hall website. Then a couple of days ago, the September report popped up, leapfrogging the earlier months. Obviously there was no weather to talk of over the summer.

On the same website there were some very seasonal reports. Apparently the grape harvest for the local wine co-op is shaping up nicely. Good grapes and plenty of them. It's the same for the almonds. An abundant crop with decent prices to the farmers. But not everything is sweetness and light. The tractor and trailer combinations that haul the grapes to the co-operative bodega and dried fruit and nuts processor are causing frustration for local car drivers. It is very annoying to get stuck behind the trailers and hemmed in by the very common - do not overtake - solid white lines of Spanish roads. Tractor drivers are being asked to use the route that skirts the town usually used by the heavy lorries. The farmers are also being warned that if they spill the grapes on the road (which soon get churned into a thick blood coloured paste) the local police may well prosecute. How they can be sure who spilled which grapes where I'm not quite sure.

In Cambridgeshire I used to get stuck behind beet lorries. Now it's grapes and almond tractors.

Anyway, September weather. Well the highest temperature was on both the 21st or the 22nd at 32ºC and there were seven days in the month when the temperature was over 30ºC. The lowest temperature was 10ºC overnight between the 28th and 29th. The mean daily high was 26.6ºC and the mean daily low was 10.8ºC which all averages out at 20.2ºC. 

The rain dumped 78.6 litres of water on every square meter in September though one day, the 7th, was responsible for 30 of those litres. 

We had 15 days of clear, sunny skies and another seven with sunny periods. Even with all that rain there were only three days when it was completely overcast.