Wine Tasting

We went to a winery for my Cultura Vitivinicola class. It was my first time inside an actual wine making place, seeing the machines and grape washers and crushers. There was a barrel room about 100 square metres, with row upon row of barrels of wine stacked on top of each other. The grape washing room reeked of alcohol which even I could smell through my blocked nose. Apparently the cleaner the grapes the better tasting the wine. I always thought dirt was supposed to add flavour to wine. In the barrel room, one guy was changing the wine from one barrel to another- they do that every six months and each wine can get changed up to four times- and checking the colour of the wine with a candle. It was so fascinating. Felt sorry for the guy though, if he had to swap all the wines around in that room every six months. I think working at a winery could cure you of alcoholism. The picture on the top is of the wine being bottled, which I took illegally. It's a strangely hypnotic process, watching the corks whizzing through the chute, then popping onto the bottles and the bottles gliding out in a uniform line, zigzagging across the room to the finish line.

We got to taste wine at the end too, a white and two reds, one young and one older which had a lovely dark colour. Unfortunately, since I was sick I couldn't smell or taste anything and they all tasted the same to me- like nothing, but with a sour aftertaste. Such a waste. I don't think I was even supposed to drink at all because I'm on antibiotics. The older red was supposed to have been really good though.

Afterwards, we had lunch back at uni with the rest of the class. It was party day at uni, with the Engineering students holding a massive party on the front lawn of the Engineering building to raise money for something (not a charity or anything, something like their end of year trip). Absolutely packed full of people, beer bottles and empty chip bags and plastic bags and wrappers everywhere. There was even music going on, and someone had brought a couch from home which she and her friends were reclining on in the middle of the footpath. Very interesting but when I walked past there after the party had ended, it was absolutely foul. The ground was sticky from all the spilt drinks, the lawn was just covered in rubbish so you could barely see any grass and there were people slumped everywhere.