The Fruit of the Gods
This week it seemed like my entire village was closed.
No one was working in the post office, half of the kids were absent from school, and the open-air market was slim pickings – moldy potatoes, anyone?. And at night, there were no people strolling the streets, or gossiping around wells - just quiet, still evening skies.
Picking grapes, that’s where almost everyone was. In the fields around our villages, where each family has a plot – or gone to the villages of their parents and grandparents, to help with the harvest there. Grapes mark the end of the harvest season (we’ve already collected cherries, tomatoes, peppers, apricots, potatoes, grain, apples, pears and corn,) and is one of Moldova’s most important, or at least most culturally important, crops.
Everyone I know here makes their own wine, “vin de acasa.” When you visit someone, it is essential that you drink at least a cup of their wine – commenting on the flavor and quality. Wine ties them to the Earth, to where they are from. My host brother, living in Chisinau, the capital, while studying law, does not drink wine produced locally near his city nor does he buy wine from the store – my host mother sends him bottles of wine from our village to drink for the year.
Wine is something Moldova can, and does brag about (although they rarely export it due to quality control standards in EU and American markets, as well as Russian bullying). Popular knowledge says that Moldova even looks like a bunch of grapes, when viewed from on the map of the world.
Picking grapes is hard. The plants are low to the ground. They easily squish and roll around. And they stain – your clothes, your hands, and your mouth. And you have a very short time to get them all off the vine before they rot, fall off, animals get them, or they freeze – like any other fruit.
Hard work, yes. But delicious work too.
(GREAT Pictures to come – my internet connection is not behaving).
No one was working in the post office, half of the kids were absent from school, and the open-air market was slim pickings – moldy potatoes, anyone?. And at night, there were no people strolling the streets, or gossiping around wells - just quiet, still evening skies.
Picking grapes, that’s where almost everyone was. In the fields around our villages, where each family has a plot – or gone to the villages of their parents and grandparents, to help with the harvest there. Grapes mark the end of the harvest season (we’ve already collected cherries, tomatoes, peppers, apricots, potatoes, grain, apples, pears and corn,) and is one of Moldova’s most important, or at least most culturally important, crops.
Everyone I know here makes their own wine, “vin de acasa.” When you visit someone, it is essential that you drink at least a cup of their wine – commenting on the flavor and quality. Wine ties them to the Earth, to where they are from. My host brother, living in Chisinau, the capital, while studying law, does not drink wine produced locally near his city nor does he buy wine from the store – my host mother sends him bottles of wine from our village to drink for the year.
Wine is something Moldova can, and does brag about (although they rarely export it due to quality control standards in EU and American markets, as well as Russian bullying). Popular knowledge says that Moldova even looks like a bunch of grapes, when viewed from on the map of the world.
Picking grapes is hard. The plants are low to the ground. They easily squish and roll around. And they stain – your clothes, your hands, and your mouth. And you have a very short time to get them all off the vine before they rot, fall off, animals get them, or they freeze – like any other fruit.
Hard work, yes. But delicious work too.
(GREAT Pictures to come – my internet connection is not behaving).
This entry was posted
on Tuesday, October 07, 2008 at 4:01 AM.
