Vinification!

About a month or so back we went to our host mom's brother's house in the nearby village of Zirnesti to participate in an afternoon of picking, hauling, crushing and siphoning in preparation for "vin nou 2009" (new wine).

This is a thing of great pride in Moldova as it should be. How many places in the world are there where almost every home grows, either collectively on the margin of town, or individually in their backyard, a diversity of grapes for their own red and white table wines.

The basic skeleton of the process is really a lot simpler than we thought, but lends itself to the science of thousands of variations for professional winemakers. You crush the grapes--gently squeezing the berries and breaking the skins to start to liberate the contents of the berries.

You allow the juice that freely runs out to gather in the vat. Drinking the juice at this stage is so sweet it can almost knock you over. Then you haul it down into the cellar or use a siphon to get it down there for fermentation, which naturally takes place for a week or two in the barrel--something to do with the yeast feeding on the sugars to produce carbon dioxide and alcohol. You can use another contraption to "press" the grape skins to get even more juice out. Most Moldovans that I have seen use this press process to make racui--which is like a type of vodka. But don't go hang out in the cellar during this boiling process. It also produces a lethal gas. Every year people perish because it is odorless. Intoxication may have something to do with this as well. And there you have it, house wine all year round. Pretty incredible.