Wine Making Time Again

Yesterday morning I was busying myself with being lazy when suddenly my wife called to me from the garden. She'd spotted in the street the man that cuts our hedges for us, Senhor P, who was apparently back from his month long Algarve holiday. Now our hedges grow pretty quickly and after a month of not being cut they are positively rampant. And so out I went, eager to grab him and ask him if he could give them a good trim sometime this week. With the obligatory Portuguese handshakes and courteous greetings out of the way I asked my question, he replied that he could, and I handed him the spare garden gate key. And then I noticed the buckets.

It was about this time last year when I first met Senhor P doing exactly what he was doing yesterday, which was fetching buckets of grapes from out of the back of his car and carrying them down the alleyway, past our front gate, and into his back yard. Thinking back a year, Senhor P must have thought I was a very strange man indeed, because with only a "Por favor!" (I really only knew my Portuguese P's and Q's back then) I'd simply grabbed a bucket in each hand and started helping to carry his grapes to his yard. And indeed I must have been a strange and very naive man back then because it was only when I first stepped into his yard that I realised what he had destined for his grapes. Of course, this year, as soon as I saw the buckets of grapes I knew what was going on and with a hearty, "Ah! Vinho!", and a quick mime of stamping on grapes, proceeded to continue my year old neighbourly tradition, reached down for a couple of buckets and walked off down the alley with them!

In his back yard he had the same equipment that he had last year, namely a large four foot tall, perhaps five foot diameter red bucket on top of which was a simple machine consisting of a hopper, some grinding gears and a turning handle. After the grapes had been weighed, on a handy set of bathroom scales, his son and I took turns in lifting up and pouring the grapes into the hopper while Senhor P himself took the important job of turning the handle. The grapes went through, along with the stalks and even a few leaves, coming out of the other side crushed and juicy, landing with a wet sloppy sounding 'Splat' in the bottom of the enormous red bucket.  While all this was going on I asked him how many litres of wine he would be making from these grapes. He replied that for every kilo and a half of grapes (or at least that's what I thought he said) he would get about one litre of wine. He then told me that we'd carried through about 80 kilos of grapes today but that he was getting a further 400 kilos on Tuesday. "That's about 320 litres", I thought to myself. My next thought was, "That's enough for one litre every day for the whole year, not counting his month in the Algarve", which surprised me at first, but then I thought about it for a moment more and realised that he must have always been planning to ferment more than the initial paltry 80 kilos considering the size of the large red container currently taking up at least a third of his back yard. It's only now, as I type this, that the thought crosses my mind that all that wine might not actually be just for him. After all, I know that he has a wife and at least two sons, one of which is married, to help him drink it all.

And so, grapes all crushed, the job was complete for now. Being neighbourly, I offered my services again to lift buckets of grapes on Tuesday, said farewell and made off down the alleyway. I hadn't got far when he called me back. Dutifully I returned to his yard wondering why he might have called me back and as I turned the corner through his gate I saw him coming out of his workshop with a bottle in one hand and two shot glasses in the other. "Ginja?" he asked? The English sensibility in me took over and so initially I declined. The prospect of getting drunk on my neighbour's home brewed firewater on a Saturday morning was not a good one. Besides, I'd heard of this drink for the first time only a couple of weeks ago, at a local Festa where a nice lady selling Ginja shots in chocolate cups had described the drink as a sweet liquer. However, Senhor P insisted that I have one and I didn't want to seem rude or ungrateful. As he poured us both a glass I told him that I'd seen the drink at the Festa, to which he laughed and explained that the stuff he made was completely different. Of course anyone who's ever tasted and kind of home brew will know that it never is anything like the commercial brands, so I really had no clue what to expect. Well, it wasn't really sweet to be honest. I mean, there was a hint of fruitiness in there, but a sour fruitiness. There was a distinctly Brandy like flavour behind the fruitiness though, and it certainly had a kick. My god, it had a kick. He offered me a second glass, which I declined. And judging by how clumsy I became half an hour later, that was probably a good decision!