Erlenbach is such a small town that as we walked through it (from a larger town nearby, as Erlenbach doesn’t have a train station) and passed a dance school, all the 15-16 year olds rushed to the window to wave and carry on. We were staying with my grandparents, well into their 80’s, so it was traditional German living all the way.
Our time was spent doing things not normally associated with tourists. Picking fruit, collecting walnuts, making jam, cleaning out and preparing the tractor and trailers for the upcoming wine harvest. Unfortunately, due to the lack of rain, the grapes weren’t quite ripe and everything had been pushed back some weeks.
Still, we were well occupied, even attending a oil presentation and tasting night (walnut, poppy, flax and canola) at my distant family’s farm. My cousin (twice or three times removed or something, we shared great-grand parents) offered to take us out to the Weindorf (literally Wine Village) festival that night, so come 10pm we’re in the midst of a MASSIVE crowd filling street after street in the middle of Heilbronn, downing wine like there was no tomorrow. Bloody surprise to me, as I’d never heard of it before and had spent a fair amount of time at my grandparents place. Highlight of the evening was Stefan (aforementioned cousin) buying a bottle of his own wine from a shop to drink with us. Hilarious. Well, at the time anyway. We were fairly drunk, wine not our normal drink of choice.
A horrible nights sleep later (wine dreams are MESSED up…not allowing a certain someone anywhere near me with a golf club again) we were roused to eat lunch before heading back to Heidelberg for a day trip, to celebrate a young cousins graduation or something. Hours of cake filled goodness followed by a table tennis tournament (as I said, one extreme – backpacking through Morocco, partying in Berlin – to the other – taking part in a family gathering playing table tennis), we retreated back to Erlenbach to pack and prepare for a long travel day tomorrow.
On a side note, pushing 190km/h on the autobahn with me in the boot…new record (for car boot speed)!
Erlenbach is such a small town that as we walked through it (from a larger town nearby, as Erlenbach doesn’t have a train station) and passed a dance school, all the 15-16 year olds rushed to the window to wave and carry on. We were staying with my grandparents, well into their 80’s, so it was traditional German living all the way.
Our time was spent doing things not normally associated with tourists. Picking fruit, collecting walnuts, making jam, cleaning out and preparing the tractor and trailers for the upcoming wine harvest. Unfortunately, due to the lack of rain, the grapes weren’t quite ripe and everything had been pushed back some weeks.
Still, we were well occupied, even attending a oil presentation and tasting night (walnut, poppy, flax and canola) at my distant family’s farm. My cousin (twice or three times removed or something, we shared great-grand parents) offered to take us out to the Weindorf (literally Wine Village) festival that night, so come 10pm we’re in the midst of a MASSIVE crowd filling street after street in the middle of Heilbronn, downing wine like there was no tomorrow. Bloody surprise to me, as I’d never heard of it before and had spent a fair amount of time at my grandparents place. Highlight of the evening was Stefan (aforementioned cousin) buying a bottle of his own wine from a shop to drink with us. Hilarious. Well, at the time anyway. We were fairly drunk, wine not our normal drink of choice.
A horrible nights sleep later (wine dreams are MESSED up…not allowing a certain someone anywhere near me with a golf club again) we were roused to eat lunch before heading back to Heidelberg for a day trip, to celebrate a young cousins graduation or something. Hours of cake filled goodness followed by a table tennis tournament (as I said, one extreme – backpacking through Morocco, partying in Berlin – to the other – taking part in a family gathering playing table tennis), we retreated back to Erlenbach to pack and prepare for a long travel day tomorrow.
On a side note, pushing 190km/h on the autobahn with me in the boot…new record (for car boot speed)!
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Erlenbach
October 27th, 2009 at 7:12 am
[...] method was quite different too. Being a large producer of wine, the Kerner family (same guys who made the oil) had much more machinery to speed things up. Tractors galore (loved driving them around, mad fun), [...]