Franz is a wine-maker.  In fact, he is one the most interesting and well-known young wine-makers in the world, because of his passion, philosophy and personality.  Franz, together with his wife Petra and his parents, run Weninger, a group of vineyards in Austria and Hungary that are tended to biodynamically.  The art of biodynamic farming – and it is most definitely an art – is an holistic agricultural system that was created by Rudolf Steiner in the latter part of the nineteenth century.  Many say it is nothing more than mumbo-jumbo pseudo-science, whilst others deem it to be a necessary and sympathetic way for human beings to live and work with nature.  Whatever you or I believe it is, Franz and Petra interpret biodynamics as the opportunity for them, as growers, to make time to get to know their land and the beasts residing within, and to treat them with kindness and compassion.  They and their families have a deep connection with their native landscape, which, as we drive out of Austria and into the wildness of the Hungarian countryside, is one of great untamed and romantic beauty.

The roads are dark and wet, and the children drift off to sleep as the van meanders through the countryside.  It’s an hour from the airport to Balf, the small village on the outskirts of Sopron where we are traveling to join the harvest at Franz’s vineyard.  The rain continues to fall as our host breaks the bad news: “It’s been a terrible year.  A lot of rain.  The grapes are no good.  We won’t be making a harvest this week.”  I sense The Husband’s disappointment is as great as mine – we’ve been planning to come for the harvest for years now – and Franz senses it too, so he drives via one of his vineyards to pluck us a bunch of grapes in the pitch black.  The children wake up as the car pulls to a stop, and find themselves chewing sweet balls of merlot fruit before they’ve even come to.  As we drive back out along the dirt track, he regales them with stories of wild pigs and deer who sleep amongst the vines and wake up at dawn to nibble the grapes.

Minutes later we enter Balf, a tiny thermal spa village in the north of Hungary and our home for the week.  We pass Franz’s winery, where the grapes are pressed, and the telegraph pole is topped with the village’s resident stork’s nest.  It feels as though we have entered the pages of a Bavarian storybook.

Franz parks the van by a quince tree drooping with unripe fruit and we step out to the howling wind that is gathering in the garden.  We head straight for the house, a beautiful restored barn where Petra and their two young sons, Paul and Emil, have waited up for the new visitors.  The fire is glowing and it is a welcoming place to be.

The four children play together, as young children who have never met do, and we help lay the table and wash the lettuce for dinner.  Zippy, who understands Vienna to be the capital city of “sausages” (unknowingly she has invented a very Jewish joke here – Ashkenazi sausages are known as ‘viennas’, as German sausages are ‘frankfurters’), is wholeheartedly expecting a plate of sausages.  Thankfully she and her brother are hungry enough to graciously accept and guzzle down a delicious plate of Petra’s homemade spätzle (pronounced ‘schpetzler’), a type of egg and flour-based pasta that is boiled and then fried in butter with onions and heaps of local Austrian mountain cheese made with cow’s milk.  It’s the kind of meal you’d want to eat after a hard day’s goat herding.  Or traveling.

The adults sprinkle the steaming dish with a little pink salt that we pounded in a pestle and mortar from the huge rock crystal that Franz and Petra’s friend went hunting for in the mountains, and toast “prost” and “l’chaim” to our friendship with the gorgeous freshly-bottled Pilton cider that we schlepped all the way from Somerset.  My family are overwhelmed by the deliciousness of this meal, the simplicity of it all, everything made by our hosts or their friends: the red root (beetroot) vinegar, the grape seed oil, the cheese, the brilliant sparkling wine, and the totally divine grape juice.  So what if we don’t harvest, I think; at least we’ll eat like mountain kings and queens.

We end the night talking about wild pigs (Zippy can’t get them out of her head) and go to bed to the sound of the wind blowing through the walnut trees.