Month: September 2014

Belgium and back to Krov for the last time.

Ghent.

Dunkirk.
Pouring water from the Yellow Sea into the English Channel, thereby bringing about world peace…

Early breakfast with the vineyard workers and we headed off up the slopes in Willhelm to the picking area. All the vines are on too steep a slope to have any machinery so it’s all done by hand.

The task is to cut the bunch from the vine with secatuers and throw them into a 35 litre box. Once the box is full, which takes about half a row of vines, it is lifted onto the truck by hand. Once processed this will produce about 20 litres of wine.

Some of the bunches could be dropped into the box straight away, but most had to be cleared of mouldy fruit on order to not taint the wine. This was done either by cutting the affected fruit away or scraping it with the fingers. It’s a tedious and messy job but important to get right to provide the best quality wines.

As Kerry said, if I’d told her a year ago she’d be picking grapes on the Mosel River with Jacob and me, and scraping mould away with her fingers, she’d not have believed any of it. But here she is, here both of us are, and it was a good thing to do.

Now and again, you can look up from the work on front and gaze over the river valley, the cruising ferries and the life going on far below. It’s a great sight.

Morning tea and lunch were brought up to the workers. Good tasty and filling food.

The afternoon saw us having time off for touristy things. Jacob took us around some villages but he’s getting sick with a cold and we were pretty exhausted from our five hours on the vineyard so we’ve retreated back to the Hof

We’d travelled the Autobahns through the day, but ducked away onto smaller roads to avoid the inevitable congestion around Frankfurt

Arrived Kröv around 4:00pm and warmly greeted by the Klein family

Changed into workclothes and picked up a load of unwanted pine boards in the village from a friend of Jan’s. He is an Aussie, has married a doctor from Hannover, and been a teacher, wine maker and now boat salesman. They live with their two young boys in a 400 year old house they bought for around 300,000 Euro. Kerry’s eyes lit up!

We followed the smelly truck, fumes reminded us of car nine in the convoy, way up into villages out of Kröv and on dark found Jan’s brother Ernst family home. A large rambling very old house in a village of 45 people, that’s valued at around 60,000 Euro, including 2000sqm of land. Kerry’s ready to pack her bags!

Jacob is so excited being back at the Hof. It’s really his home away from home and he’s very proud to show us around. Tomorrow it’s been arranged for us to go grape picking on the slopes, that should be interesting!