It’s still stormy when we wake up. We get dressed and step outside to see our surroundings for the first time in the daylight. It is lovely here; there is a wonky treehouse with obligatory rickety ladder drifting in the bough of a walnut tree, and next to this an enormous trampoline covered in rusty leaves and the crisp corpses of emerald-coloured dragonflies. The ground is wet-green and muddy with thick clay soil, which is studded with a hundred walnuts. Petra tells us that she cannot keep up with the fruits of their nut trees, and lists the things she and Franz make each year.

I am intrigued by the schwarze walnüsse (black walnuts), pickled young walnuts in their shells that turn from green to night black during their preserving. Plucked from the trees on Der Johannistag, the longest day of the year (the summer solstice), these green walnuts spend 14 days in water, which is changed twice a day. After this they sit in salt water before being cooked for half an hour, then washed and cooked again with peppercorns, mustard seeds, cloves, salt, sugar and vinegar until the liquid turns to syrup. The syrup is strained, more sugar is added and the nuts are cooked again; this process is repeated three times. Finally, the walnuts are preserved in this thick liquor for six months.

At the end of the garden is an enclosed wilderness where seven hens beak the ground like clockwork under the watchful eye of their cockerel brother. This is the red-hatted chap that will wake us every morning with his “kikiriki”, much to the delight of our city-dwelling children. We are shown how to feed the chickens with the stinking bucket of leftovers and the bin of grain that is kept under their coop, which was built by Franz.

He used his old Weninger wine crates padded out with straw as nest boxes, and they seem to do the trick as the children collect four warm brown and white eggs from the branded beds. This is the life, I think, as our boy Roo finds his inner chicken and unsuccessfully attempts to scramble up the run into the henhouse.

The house has two lazy security guards: Chuli, the cool boy cat, who slinks around the perimeter; and Aphra, the huffing grey-black dog, who slumbers between the sunny deck or squashed up against the legs of guests beneath the dining table.  There are the biggest garden snails I have ever seen, sloping and slipping about under bindweed, sucking themselves against the old wine barrels spilling out herbs and vegetables onto the grass.

Franz leaves early to work over the border, and the rest of us spend the day getting to know our new home and the village of Balf (the name coming from the Hungarian word for wolf, as it is rumoured these wild creatures roam the land here between Austria and Hungary, seeking out wild pigs).  We take a gentle walk into the centre, passing the uninhabited resident stork’s nest, the patterned frogs dashing into the stream that flows in front of the houses, and the chestnut horse nibbling at the clover in a neighbour’s front garden.  Pink-cheeked children criss-cross their push bikes around us, their laughter and the whirring of wheels interrupted by the guttural yodels of guard dogs of differing shapes and sizes clawing at the gates of every house we pass.  In Balf, everyone has a guard dog.

Our favourite chimney is one capped with a great copper gingerbread house, on which sits a witch riding her broomstick, spinning in the wind.  I could almost hear the weathervane laugh as she danced to the music of the breeze, cackling in the wildness of the landscape.  I relished this sighting for just that morning I’d read the following passage in Jay Griffiths’ beautiful book, ‘Wild: An Elemental Journey’:

“In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the male point of view decreed that both women and nature needed to be constrained… The witch-hunters thought nature’s wildness was evil: wild weather, lightning and thunder, wildcats, toads and storms all became associated with witchery.  Out on the heathen heath, frotting against tree trucks, witches would have sex outside, not indoors with the godly, and their wild infernal dancing suggested the very groin of wilderness.”

And here we are, it seems, slap-bang in the womb of the Hungarian wild; in a country that loves the witch, her beastly minions (the emerald frogs, the giant snails, the cool cats, the wolves) and all the sexy nature that comes with her.  This is an exciting, quiet place to be.  The city is, by contrast, brash, frigid and gratefully a long way away now.

Balf is surrounded by vineyards – weingartens, vine/wine gardens – that are irrigated by the rains, the Neusiedlersee lake that stretches between Austria and Hungary, and the natural springs that burst out of the basalt slate terroir.  The family’s winery is in the middle of Balf village.  It is a great modern building of shining metal and local stone, rubbing shoulders with the cultural centre next door, frilly with Communist-era additions.  We stop at the winery and Petra shows us around.  The children scramble up and fight with each other to sit on the rusty tractors resting in the courtyard, which had earlier brought in the grapes from the vineyards.

We explore the expanse of the yeasty-smelling press house – a hangar for giant metal fermentation tanks that are either fat and dripping with young wine, or empty and sparkling with sediment.  The children have great fun poking their heads into the empty tanks and shouting up so that their echoes call back drunkenly.

Before locking up, Petra takes us down to the cellar where rows upon rows of oak barrels are piled up, waiting to be opened a year later.  Each barrel is labeled with a chalky scribble, ‘syrah’, ‘merlot’, ‘blaufränkisch’.  (Franz later tells us that he sells some of these used barrels to Scottish whiskey distilleries who request them, penetrated with the flavour of the vine, for a special type of scotch.  We try the stuff and it knocks our socks off it’s so heavy with alcohol.)

On the way home we stop at a playground underneath a weeping willow, whose branches the children turn into swords. They play a dangerous game on a roundabout with their fresh weapons in one hand and a kipfle – a boiled then baked crescent-shaped bread (not unlike our beigel) seasoned with salt and caraway – in the other.  Every now and then their war game is interrupted by the buzzing and whooshing of two teenage boys on their mopeds, chugging up and down the alleyway next to the playground.  (The skinny boy wears a helmet and has a real moped whilst his oversized friend has to struggle up the hill on what seems to be a miniature mobility scooter.  Every time he has to get off halfway up to push, and it is a sight to behold.)  Zippy and Roo are having so much fun with their new friends that they both wet themselves. Of course, we have no spare clothes with us, so we walk home with soiled children.

After more trampolining, we sit down to last night’s leftover spätzle, chanting “ich lieber spätzle!” (I love spätzle!).  We finish with homemade kaiserschmarrn (king’s pudding) – a delicious, fluffy sweet pancake – served with Petra’s homemade spiced plum preserve and a wild raspberry sauce, made by her mother who had foraged the fruit on a recent trip to the Swedish alps.

We settle the children to sleep as the wind picks up once again, before returning to the table to drink Steiner and plan the week ahead, as the fire roars behind us.  Tomorrow, it is agreed, we head into Sopron.