Lost in transit

Kellergassen

My wife, our youngest daughter and I went to a wine-cellar-street festival in a village about half an hour's drive from where we live, out in the country. It is a region of Austria with good earth both for growing vineyards and digging deep wine cellars to store the wine, and they have hillsides with narrow streets running along them, more like broad ditches fifteen feet deep dug or worn down over the years, lined with small houses that lead down to the cellars.

This particular village has seven such streets, and once a year two or three of those streets get together and hold a festival, where they set up picnic tables in the street, and serve food and wine. It was was a hot day and the event was well-attended. We walked from cellar to cellar, eating and drinking. Most of the cellars were serving traditional specialties like various cold-cuts and breads and cheeses, but one had calamari on the menu. It looked good, like onion rings, deep-fried in a batter, but eh, seafood in a rural village in a land-locked country in Central Europe? We had cold cuts.

Finding a toilet was the biggest problem. One waitress suggested my wife go in a vineyard like everyone else. We finally found a restroom and waited in line.

At one cellar there was live music, and as luck would have it the musician, an old man in Lederhosen, playing an accordion and singing, sat *on* our table so we had the best seat in the house, so to speak.

Events such as this, and the similar but less-elaborate "Heurigen" where individual farmers run wine taverns in their barns for a couple weeks a year selling their wines and other products (coldcuts, usually) are among the things I enjoy most about living in Austria. One can have something to drink, and a glass of wine, with friends while the children run around exhausting themselves, petting the animals, falling off swings onto cobblestone courtyards and generally getting filthy.

As an American, I initially found this practice of drinking in public with children on the premises exotic and charming. I am getting accustomed to it, but it hasn't lost its charm.

Here are a few more photos, sorry they're so small etc. In the landscape photo you can barely see the Kellergassen in the distance, among the vineyards. The photo of the small house, a shed of some sort, I've included because the colors were so nice. A man was urinating against the wall on the other side of it as I took the picture.

Posted by Mig at June 29, 2003 01:34 PM