September is Vinobrani time. It's the new wine season when wine festivals across the country feature stands stacked with liters of burčak or stormy wine - the grape's cider. Wine festivals seem almost always to include fun fairs too, and costumed reenactors [4&6], booths full of handmade toys and gingerbread valentines [3].
Last weekend we drove to Roudnice nad Labem to check out the Lobkowiczs' vinobrani celebrations and visit some friends. The weather was beautiful, just right for a vinobrani day, and the children loved running from booth to booth trying out the wooden swords and shields (C added a shield to her collection), and begging for the very many choices of candy and helium balloons.
Roudnice is built around the chateau [1], which stands just above the Labe river. The Lobkowicz family is gradually restoring the chateau now, and it has the air of a decayed beauty with a well built roof promising better days ahead. We arrived early, before twelve and burčak time, but not too early for sausages [5], or for several rides on the merry go round [center].
5 comments:
Oooh, I hope that your festival was less crazy than the P2 one last year... Beautiful pics :)
So much less crazy. You could actually walk around normally and see things. And the burcak was the best I've ever had!
Delicious, and what a quite amazing sausage...
Not a word about whether it will be a good vintage. Come on, J. But I think we've had this exchange before. If you sipped it it would be en primeur and that requires an act of faith to imagine the taste eighteen months hence. Just have to make do with pivo. And that's no great sacrifice.
The burcak really was the best I've tried, but it tastes so different from wine - it is more like slightly fermented grape juice than wine at this point - that it is hard to say. I've heard though that this should be a banner year for Czech wine!
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