The weather has been faithful, and by morning the skies are clear and blue. We will harvest today.
Franz left early to fix a pump at the winery, and we anticipate his return as Petra fixes us coffee and porridge to fortify us for the labours that await in the vineyards.
The vineyards are a ten minute drive away, through an undulating green landscape of never-ending rows of vines climbing to reach the sunlight and bowing towards the mineral-rich earth. There are countless vignerons selling their wines and surplus grapes by the punnet, from wooden barrows with hand-painted signs at the gateways to their groves. At each entrance there are groups of fat-calved cyclists doing the Austria-Hungary tour who have dropped their rides and lycra-smoothed bodies to taste the local fruit and tipple.
We turn left off the main road and make our way up a winding, holey track to reach Franz’s winery. We pass rose bushes laden with ruby hips, apple trees, banks of wild flowers, and a plant I have never before seen, known locally as the milk orange tree.
More commonly known as the Osage orange in its native North America, the milk orange tree is a nondescript large shrub that produces perfectly round baubles of lime-green fruit that have a surface pattern not dissimilar to the human brain. Whilst the seeds are apparently edible (although require some preparation), the fruit is not, and the drupes that make up its bumpy skin contain a milky, latex-based liquid that is traditionally used as an insect-repellent in the plant’s native America. Franz informs us that the yellow-orange bark of the tree can be used as a natural dye and the wood is prized for bow-making. So revered, in fact, is the wood by Native Americans – who have long whittled it into bows, tomahawks and tools – that the observing early French settlers called it ‘bois d’arc’ or ‘bow wood’, as it is also now known.
Franz knows a lot about the land on which his vines grow. He has a deep relationship with the soil that supports each vineyard – one is slate, the other loam, there’s a clay one, and a chalky one too – and he hears what each is lacking if the vine doesn’t thrive; a little water, some chamomile maybe, or perhaps some more cow shit. He talks to his plants and tends to them as if they were his own children and his grandparents all at once (these vineyards have been in his family for generations after all). He grows vermouth (pictured below), nettles, chamomile and clover around their feet to provide vital nutrients and please the wildlife that flutters and buzzes around their toes. This is biodynamic winemaking.
We reach the vineyard and park up on the long grass next to a tractor – much to the delight of Zippy, Roo and Franz’s son Paul (whose bedroom wall is plastered with tractor posters and floor littered with tractor toys). In front of us is a bank of vines that is dotted with doubled-over pickers cutting bunches of grapes at high speed. The workers, as Franz calls them, move quickly from vine to vine, pushing wheelbarrows that are full-up with pearlescent-green or deep-red fruit by the time they reach the end of the row.
The pickers are mostly Hungarian locals but there are two from Romania who travel twice a year to come for the main harvests. I am shocked by age of one woman who looks as though she may be in her seventies and should instead be indoors watching Coronation Street with a piece of fruit cake and a cup of tea. It is hot and this is hard work. But why ever not be outdoors in this beautiful place on earth?
As the workers tip each barrow-load of grapes into the plastic crates piled high on the trailer behind the tractor, Roo finds a perfect spot to pinch bunches out of the containers. He gobbles the grapes up as quickly as they are being bought in from the vines, and Paul looks on bewildered by this strange English boy eating all of his father’s profits.
Zippy, prickling from the long grass and grumpy with the heat, is placated only by her younger brother’s offerings of forbidden fruit. Momentarily both our children are silent.
Then, as young Paul vanishes into the distance on the tractor with the workers, Franz hands The Husband and I a pair of scissors each and a wheelbarrow, and points us in the direction of a row that requires defruiting. Before long, he too disappears to check on another part of the vineyard, and The Husband and I are left with our offspring in the middle of a winery. In Hungary. Without water. In the sweltering heat. Both children start to cry; their legs are itchy, they are tired, they want more grapes… those bloody efficient workers have stripped the vines bare so we can’t even feed the kids.
The Husband and I carry the children on our shoulders as we attempt to harvest some grapes. One grape, even. We reach the end of the row and look down into the sorry-looking barrow, before trying to find more vines to trim. But there’s nothing left to do – the workers have already been and gone, and there’s still no sign of humankind around us. All that is left for us to do is sit and wait.
Luckily, we only have to wait for five minutes. But it was a pretty long five minutes. The Husband and I were exchanging nervous glances, and I’m sure he was designing a shelter made of grape wood (useless) whilst I figured out a way of surviving on grapes (hopeless).
Franz peers into our wheelbarrow and asks us what happened. We explain that we couldn’t find the workers and that they had been too good at working. He asks us to hand back both pairs of scissors and says that it’s important they are returned in case they end up in the pressing machine. I think this is a very good excuse for not having to inform us that we are completely and utterly rubbish at harvesting.
We pile back into the car and head for the winery, where the grapes will later be bought in for pressing. Franz takes us to a fermentation tank that is full of young white wine. He fills two glasses straight from the tap poking out at the bottom of the enormous metal cauldron, and hands them to us. It tastes incredible. An infant wine is slightly fizzy with fermentation but still deliciously sweet, like grape juice. It is barely alcoholic (because it has only just started fermenting) and so the children are fed the nectar too; they want to know what all the fuss is about. Zippy can barely get enough and I worry that she might be shikker by her second glass.
After the tasting, Franz shows us the teas he makes for his plants: there are huge wooden trunks brimming with dried nettles, chamomile, and other herbs that I don’t recognise, each to be concocted, stirred in magical ways, and used during certain times of the year for certain purposes. He shows us the cow horns filled with cow shit that are used ritually during the twelve lunar months to impregnate the soil, and provide spiritual and nutritional health for his vines. Franz is the man once dubbed the Kurt Cobain of wine-making but I’m thinking he’s more Cat Stevens.
We return home to meet Aliz, the very sweet twelve year-old neighbour and free-of-charge childminder, holding Emil, Franz and Petra’s baby. Apparently she comes over every Saturday and Sunday to play with the children because her school friends are in Austria. During the week Aliz lives there, in one room with her mother who works as a cleaner, beautician and pizza chef so that her daughter can go to a ‘better’ school over the border. At weekends, they live back at home in Hungary with her father, a printer, and her younger brother. This arrangement clearly works in some way as Aliz speaks better English than me.
Whilst Aliz is outside trampolining with the children, Franz and Petra ask us if we would help them slaughter one of their chickens. None of us have done this before but we are all meat-eaters who share concerns about the industrialisation and unethical ‘production’ of meat, and over the years we have all talked about the notion of rearing and slaughtering our own animals so that we can more closely value their lives and deaths. The Husband puts himself forward for the job, and I offer to help butcher and cook the chicken. In the morning we will go and talk to the birds.
Before going to bed, the adults scan Youtube for videos for ‘the most pain free way to kill a chicken’. We find the best shohet – an American lady with a sweet voice and a kindly face who appears to have a calming effect on her hen – amongst many offerings, including a man who jokingly mentions making a chicken gas chamber using a plastic bucket. I am reminded of Gene Wilder’s ‘Spring Time for Hitler’ and think Thank G-d two Jews and two Austrians can sit together in Hungary and see the irony of it all.