grapes

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Hello from beautiful Aurora; last week we arrived home after an uneventful trip from Vienna. I like uneventful trips, especially on planes. We had a fun last few days in Europe let me tell you about them. We were traveling with the Atwood’s, Mark and MG. Luke’s parents. We drove south from Vienna and turned east at Graz and found ourselves driving through rolling hills not unlike we see in east Multnomah county heading towards the Cascade range. In fact the terrain is nearly the same. If Mt. Hood suddenly emerged behind the hills to the east we would be in Estacada. It’s very, very green and come to think of it if we substituted rock walls for grapes we would be in Ireland…beautiful.
We found a nice Zimmer (hotel) on a hill overlooking all this splendor and booked two rooms for the night and heading into the little town looking for wineries to taste the local fruit. We stumbled around for a bit and asked a few questions, well Nancy did because she is the only one of us close to being fluent alf deutsch. Our first stop was at a pleasant winery with a great patio featuring very large umbrellas under which we sat hiding from the hot sun. We sampled the white local wine and enjoyed conversation with the patrons. The wine master told us he had begun his career at age fifteen, in 1947, in Vienna. He looked like he knew what he was doing and the wine was quite nice, especially the muscatel, which was a tangy white, not sweet, not particularly dry but very refreshing. It was the unanimous choice as the best of what we tasted.
We drove around for a bit stopping at different places all of which were closed but finally found a delightful restaurant for dinner. We all ordered fish, nothing else was on the menu, and hoped for the best. Four different entrée’s, four great meals, eight glasses of wine and a bottle to go later, we paid our ninety-seven euros and headed back for a pleasant evening on our balcony. The rooms were adjoining and cost forty-two euros per person, eighty-four for the room. We all decided that in the Napa Valley we would have to put a two in front of the eight.
I slept like a baby and because I purposely left my alarm clock at home Joey woke me up at 6:30, which he nearly always does. After a constitutional walk, for Joey not yours truly, we settled in the dining room for a breakfast of yogurt, cereal, cheese and bread. The coffee in Austria is always great and this was no exception. In fact it’s coffee that usually fills our suitcase for the flight home. I’m not sure where we Americans went wrong in the “How to make a pot of coffee” derby, but we certainly did.
Day two of our little journey was much like the last half of day one. We stopped at a new winery, the “Gasthaus Tscheppe” an der Weinstrasse, (on the wine road) and listened to a young man tell us about their grapes. We sampled a few, bought a few and when a tour bus arrived we moved on to a second place. It actually didn’t look like a winery but more like an outdoor store you would find along the coast highway in Oregon selling local fruits and jams and such. Indeed it turned out to be the “Moser Winery” and the Viking look-a-like that poured the grape was a real character. He spoke almost no English and without Nancy we would have been completely lost. His wine was better than at our first stop and we ended up buying quite a bit, convincing ourselves that we needed to start a wine Keller in Vienna. It may have been that we had “tasted” a little too much but it was fun. The guy was big enough to be an NFL lineman and delighted in telling us about his product. “My fathers son…me,” was how he began each presentation. Laughing as he spoke, it might have been his only English, he would proceed to tell us why this particular wine was so special. One of his wines had been served at the White House and they all were very, very good. His family had been doing the wine thing for four hundred years with a two hundred year break in the middle. Safe to say long enough to get it right.
Driving over and around the fairy tale like hills with wineries nearly every hundred yards was quite the experience. Visions of Hansel and Gretel and gingerbread houses flashed through my mind and took me back to my grade school days which as I remember were spent filling coloring books with my crayola crayons. Red topped roofed houses of periwinkle blue, yellows of every shade and lavender set me to humming one of my favorite songs. Lavender Blue Dilly Dilly, lavender Green, now I’ll be king Dilly Dilly you’ll be my queen. I sang it to Nancy of course.
The road was about as wide as a golf course cart path but there was very little traffic to worry about. This part of Austria has a surreal feeling about it. I get the distinct feeling I’m in Lilliputian Land. The patchwork quilt visual affect, rows of grapevines climbing up and down the sometimes amazingly vertical terrain with the empty green fields in between, seemed to come directly from my childhood coloring book. Different shades of green from Emerald to Forest to Lime, indeed throughout the entire spectrum of possible greens were trees and fields of grass and criss-crossing vineyards. It was a spectacular sight.
Once again we found a delightful spot for the evening stop along the Weinstrasse and after a nice meal settled in for an easy slumber. The twenty-four euro price per person at the Helene Menhart Gastezimmer worked quite well into my travel budget.
Next we drove over the mountains following typical European graphic road signs, to the A-2 and took the freeway to Italy. We headed south until the Alps, actually the Dolomites, disappeared in my rear view mirror and the land flattened out heading towards the Adriatic Sea. About noon we stopped in a little town, we called it Spiegelberg, but it wasn’t spelled exactly like that, for lunch. We chose a roadside restaurant called “The Blob.” The food was good in spite of the name and one of the other customers told us of a winery down the road, which turned out to be very good. We got a custom tour from one of the workers and bought too much red but we didn’t care.
Once again our dinner was special and they had a wonderful quiet apartment not far away where we settled in for the night. We finished the evening sipping on a recently purchased bottle of Red in the garden, with Mark and MG, while Mother Nature supplied a symphony of thunder and lightning.
We awoke to bright sun and clear skies in the town of Valva and after a typical European breakfast we started the journey back to Vienna. We made one wine stop at the Cantina Co-op in Rauscedo for a wine tasting. Turns out the place was the equivalent of a local gas station only with wine. The locals were lined up with their own jugs in the waiting room adjacent to the tasting bar. The busy on duty laborer poured our wine and in between would fill the local’s jug’s with the wine of their choice…directly out of the huge vats using a hose not unlike the local gas station attendant did thirty years ago. I halfway expected him to clean our windshield but he didn’t. The locals came with jugs of all shapes and sizes, from small Chianti like bottles to what appeared to be five-gallon gas cans. “A bottle of Red, a bottle of White”….I swear I could almost hear Billy Joel in the background. The wine we tasted was the same as was supplied the locals and it was pretty good and ranged in price from two thirty for the Tocai Friulano to six fifty euros for the Bianco Cuvee per bottle. The same wine ranged from one fifteen for the Merlot to six euros per liter for the Pinot Bianco Brut, poured directly into your own container. I’m going back next spring.
We stopped at the border for one last Italian repast before finding a small Zimmer in a quiet Austrian village for the night. We were two hours from Vienna and could have been a hundred miles from civilization while only twenty minutes from the A2 freeway. One more dinner with enough food for six people completed our little journey.
Mark and MG were great traveling partners and while our method of travel, by the seat of the pants, would scare off most travelers we did just fine. We had a great four days and I’m sure we’ll remember them while enjoying a nice Willamette Valley Red some cool and quiet November night in Keizer, hopefully celebrating a Celt victory, with our good friends. You all take good care. Der coach

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