Les Vendanges!

What a great day doing 'les vendanges' (grape harvesting) at my cousin's vineyard today in Turckheim: perfect weather, fun company, and a decent yield of almost 1.2t of very sweet pinot noir grapes. It took nine of us about four hours to get the job done and for my husband it was his first time :)

After a nice lunch of choucroute garnie prepared by my cousin's wife, we took the grapes to the wine co-op and got to see the equipment and setup that processes the grapes into that wonderful wine. Very interesting.

The wine will be great -- based on the sugar content of the grapes, but the overall yield is very small: a late spring frost on the young vines and a couple of nasty hailstorms mean that the harvest is somewhere between 20 and 40% of what it should be. If you make a living from that, it'll be a tough year...

The pic features my cousin and his wife in the middle, my mom to the left and my husband in red on the right.

See a whole lot more pix of that adventure here.