Developing a taste for it

While staying with the Schaefers recently we took a day trip down the Moselle river to a town called Alken to see one of the region's first wine festivals. A day of beautiful scenery and delicious wines, people in high spirits and people getting high on spirits.

The town of Alken was built on the banks of the Moselle, at the bottom of a tall hill.

When you have a town you need a castle, and every good castle should be at the top of a hill.

What do you do with all the space between though?

You fill it full of grape vines of course.


And if you have lots of grape vines, you really should make lots of wine.


Well, if you're going to make lots of wine, you might as well have a festival.


And you can't have a wine festival and not invite Bacchus, the god of wine.


And every good wine festival needs the blessing of the Onion Queen.

Personally, I'm not one for traditions, I have my own ways of celebrating the time of harvest, which mainly involves falling asleep in a car and then blinding myself with mustard fumes at the old mustard factory.

But each to his own.