Three Days, part 2

On Sunday, August 1, we went to the Weinfest in Michelbach, a village near here where Papa was born and raised. Michelbach, now a part of Alzenau, is nestled in the hills to the east of Grosskrotzenburg, where we live. Michelbach is part of the Unterfranken region in the state of Bavaria. Grosskrotzenburg, our town of 8000 souls, is a part of the central state of Hessen. Sunday afternoon, we went to Weingut Heilmann, the family vinyards run by Papa's father's brother's son's son, Armin. I can't figure out which relation that makes him, but we spent the afternoon drinking wine that he made from the grapes in the fields we sat next to, eating pfifferlinge (a mushroom that is in season now) gathered in the region, with cream sauce from cows in the next town, over handmade noodles. Followed by coffee and cake, plum cake known as  Quetsche or zwetschgen kuchen. Armin Heilmann's Riesling won first place for Best Riesling in 2010 from an international panel. He will go to Rome to receive the award. Armin was the busboy that day and cleared the glasses from the tables. From August 12 through Septmber 5, they also have what they call Haeckerwirtschaft, in which they serve food and wine in their converted barn.

Not a bad life, eh? I like that plan, maybe I'll have a seasonal restaurant on our land in August and September when we have lots of produce coming in from the garden, and chicken and lamb and goat cheese. I could probably do it for two months! The bottles you see on the tables are flat and round, which is the traditional shape for wine bottles from this region. They are called Bocksbeutel (Buck's pouch) and are fashioned after the old flasks made from the bladders of goats that had that shape. Only wine from Franken can be sold in those bottles. We shared a bottle of dry Riesling and then I drank a glass of "Bacchus", a sweeter white wine, while we listened to an old German oompah band that also played Frank Sinatra and 40s Jazz on trumpet, tuba, and accordion. Quite an afternoon.

When we arrived home that evening I blanched the grape leaves in preparation for stuffing the next day. The leaves I had were older than I would have liked so I let them cook a few minutes more- about 7 minutes at a boil- to soften the leaves further. Then I rolled them and put them in plastic bags in the fridge. A friend I spoke to on the phone told me that her grandmother, who was from Rhodes, and mother, would go out and pick wine leaves in the spring and then layer them with olive oil and vinegar to keep for when they would make dolmades. I learned to make Lebanese stuffed Grape leaves with a friend I lived with for a time at the zen center, Samar. Her parents were from Lebanon and she taught me many wonderful recipes when we worked in the kitchen together.

Talking with new friends from school (German language classes) about food and the traditions from their homes, I remarked that I love to eat and I do not mind so much where the food comes from, meaning which culture it arises out of, only that I do not want to eat food that comes from "nowhere". Fast food from the U.S. has infiltrated here as well, I imagine from the presence of the American soldiers in Frankfurt and Hanau and Wiesbaden since WW2. There are KFC, McDonald's, Burger King, Subway all throughout Frankfurt. This is somehow disturbing for me, part of why I was looking forward to moving here was to get away from exactly this in the American Culture- fast, fake, and bigger is better- and it has followed me over here. I suppose, as Wendell Berry writes in The Unsettling of America; Culture and Agriculture, when speaking about the American historical and present relationship with the land of North America and the peoples who originally lived upon it, "We can understand a great deal of our history...by thinking of ourselves as divided into conquerors and victims. In order to understand our own time and predicament and the work that is to be done, we would do well to shift the terms and say that we are divided between exploitation and nurture. The first set of terms is too simple for the purpose because, in any given situation, it proposes to divide people into two mutually exclusive groups...The terms exploitation and nurture, on the other hand, describe a division not only between persons but also within persons. We are all to some extent the products of an exploitative society, and it would be foolish and self defeating to pretend that we do not bear its stamp."

If this is true, and I am totally prepared to acknowledge that it is, then the itch of awareness of the fast food life and all it represents (soil erosion, chemicals in the soil and water, monocultures, agribusiness, machine made) that crawls across my belly, seems to be for the purpose of helping me to remember. As Pablo Neruda says, "remembering is so short, forgetting so long". This seems to be the sum of my spiritual life or my drive towards making a life; the numbness of forgetting seeps in and steels over my heart. KFC wakes me up out of the slumber of little town mind and reminds me why it is so important to drink Armin Heilmann's wine. (Tasting as good as it does, of course, provides a more palatable and immediate reason to drink it.) The hand made life can only be lived here in my own house and heart. When I am in despair over "the state of the world" my answer is to turn towards my own life and make stuffed grape leaves with leaves from Papa's garden.