Grape harvest deluxe

A cloudy day in late September. 7:30 a.m.: getting off to a 20 min. four-wheel drive into the mountains. Awaiting us is a vineyard around a mountain house with spectacular views. All in all we are three tractors and trailers, their drivers and four more co-workers/family and friends. These are well-kept vines in tidy rows with few rotten or reddish grapes. The owner likes big buckets: the first trailer fills rapidly but one's back also notes it. After about one and a half hours of work, it is time for breakfast: everybody brought their own but there is fresh coffee. After about three quarters of an hour, off to work again. Three hours later: dinner, the best part of the workday. There is meat roasted on a big grill: chicken for the timid like me, and a variety of local sausages, rabbit (?); accompanied by beans, grilled vegetables, roasted bread, cake, and wine, coffee, brandy.
All in all two hours of rest and another two hours of work.
Most interesting: the story-telling, experiences of the past, travel adventures from central Europe in the 1990s and Iran already in the new millenium (for breakfast). Complaints about a wife not letting her husband having a tv. Gossip from the past: a lot of stories about unwed women looking for and getting their satisfaction, even in times of state catholicism under Franco; these stories came after the alcohol-laden dinner...
[The blogger was interrupted by his daughter here, otherwise the later part could have been more exhaustive...]

Noah Gordon's "The bodega"

This is not a work of high-brow literature, but you would not expect it from this author anyway. It has the usual Gordon plot of a young person with a more than questionable future who then succeeds against all odds due to hard work, self-discipline and a lot of luck.
What distinguishes this novel is its setting in a Catalan wine-growing region in the second half of the 19th century. Gordon has a fine eye for the details of wine-growing and the various factors that lead to a good wine, such as terroir, climate, hard work, the right mix of grape varieties, storage, etc.
The story is set against the background of the "Carlist civil war". Gordon's hero undergoes a long preparatory process for a war in which he will finally not fight. The narration of how he gets out of more than one desperate situation makes for entertaining bedtime reading.
Recommended if your are interested in 19th century Spanish and Catalan social history and/or wine-growing in general, as a lof of the labor-intensive process still remains basically the same today.

Odd is that Gordon sets his novel in a Catalan landscape and then uses the Spanish word "bodega" in the the English title, instead of the Catalan "celler". Odder still is its German title "Der Katalane" (the Catalan).

Back to school

Today was the first day of the new school year for about 1.2M students in Catalunya - after 85 days of summer holidays. Related topics on the news were the fear of the new flu spreading through class-rooms, and the introduction of laptop computers replacing traditional textbooks for the first 130.000 (?) or so of students.