Fête du Vin Nouveau: The End

Time to wrap up this series on the Fête du Vin Nouveau. First, I leave you with the picture of Theresa and I, above. Cindy Eaton was kind enough to take this for us. We haven't posted too may tourist pictures of us as a couple. So, here is one to make up for that.

Finally, as I said way back at the beginning, the Fête du Vin Nouveau is the Festival of the New Wine. The star of the festival is the newly pressed grape juice, or Vin Nouveau, that is available in every winery or from street stands. This is not your normal supermarket grape juice though. It is alive.

If you buy some to take home, the people selling will advise you to leave the screw cap off the bottle. If you screw the cap on tight, the bottle will explode.

You see, the grape juice is fresh and will start to ferment all by itself. Bernard Raulin, my Alsatian friend advised that the best thing about Vin Nouveau is that it changes it's flavor each day. On the first day or two, it is very sweet and tastes like high quality grape juice. Then, it starts to get a bit fizzy and tastes like grape soda. Then, it continues to be fizzy and picks up a distictive hint of alcohol...like a hard cider. Each day it will get a little harder.

The first picture below is some vin nouveau from Eguisheim. It is a mixture of Muscat and Edelswicker grapes and it like no white grape juice you will ever buy at the grocery. The second picture shows some vin nouveau we picked up in Germany. There, we were able to find both white and red varieties.

The trick says Bernard, is that you have to drink it before it starts to have a hint of vinegar in the taste. At that stage, the worst part is not that you have to throw the remaining juice away. The worst part is that it becomes a very, very effective laxative at that point.