Big day.

The woman we are staying with, Frida, had hooked me up with one of her friends who owns a vinyard. She arranged for me to work the afternoon on the vinyard as they are in the midst of harvesting all the grapes for the season. I didnt know what to expect but was really excited about the experience.

I was dropped off around 12:30 and met the owners, a really nice Swiss couple with a large farm house. I then quickly joined up with the team of workers to prepare for the afternoons work. They have a group of portugues and polish workers that return every year to work and I was to spend the day working with them in the vinyards piking grapes.

Right away, they pulled up with a tracktor and some trailors and everyone jumped on the side. I of course followed suite. Next thing I know I am standing on this trailor holding on for my life as we are cruising at 60 km an hr to make our way to the vinyards. Not gonna lie, it was a little scary!

Then the work starts. 5 hours of hunched over work as you clip the grapes off the vines and place them in a bucket. When the vinyard is done. hop on the trailor and get taken to the next site. It was very laborous work. Definetly not a walk in the park but I none the less enjoyed it a great deal. I was snacking on the grapes, all different kinds, gamay, chasselas, pinot noire, chardonay...really cool. then at 3 pm we stopped, had sandwiches, brownies and wine from the vinyard,...then back to work until 6 pm. It was tiresome work but well worth the experience. I got to talk a lot with the owner and he told me a great deal of interesting information about the business. I calculated that in a 2.5 hr time interval, our team was able to pick grapes for close to 5000 bottles of wine. Pretty cool! We were filling big bins that held almost a ton each.

After the work was done for the day we rode back on the trailer, of course through another amazing scenic route. Mountains surround the farms and vinyards and only open up to let the Rhone river pass through. When we got back to the farm house, the owner, his son, myself and two other family friends went out back into his barn where he keeps the wine and went through 2 bottles of white Chasselas wine and discussed the business of making wine in Switzerland. He then put me together a box of 5 or 6 different bottles from his vinyards and invited be back for tomorrow for another day of work. Tomorrow I will be eating lunch with the family and who knows what stories and interesting things I will come with this time!

P.S. 2008 Wine from Avusy in the Geneva region is going to be a good year after I finish putting my stamp on it!