Labor Day 2010

We finished up the Labor Day weekend with three more fests. I'm probably starting to sound like a broken record but I hope you're not getting tired of hearing about our fetes of festing. The three wine fests we visited on Sunday and Monday were in Mainz, Ebes-Büdesheim and Rodenbach.

We had planned on driving up to Mainz on Sunday for one of their many wine festivals. This one was in their Volkspark. A very nice park on the side of hill on the south side of the Rhine River. There were 73 vintners and lots of jewelry vendors. This wine fest, although quite enjoyable, was much more highbrow than a Bernkastel or Worms wine fest. Here's Jeff checking out the wines, a nice Silvaner. We walked around for a couple hours then started the drive back home with the intent to stop at another wine fest we saw on the drive to Mainz.

About a half hour north of Wielerbach, we were crossing a huge autobahn bridge just west of Alzey. This bridge stretches across a huge valley that's covered with vineyards. Out in the fields we saw hundreds and hundreds of people walking through these vineyards to visit a number of tents that were located at various farm road intersections within the vineyards. It really looked like fun so we decided to stop there on the way home from Mainz. That's just what we did. Took the Ebes-Büdesheim exit off the autobahn right into the vineyards. Ebes-Büdesheim is a wine producing village west of Alzey in this huge valley I mentioned earlier. Here's Jeff checking out the grapes. So we walked through the vineyards, checked out a couple of the little tents, had some wine and pressed on for home.

Today, Labor Day, we drove over to Rodenbach which is only a half mile south of our town of Weilerbach. It's a small town with a small fest celebrating the Neuer wine. Most of these wine growing towns will have a Neuer (new) wine celebration to allow the locals to sample this year's unfermented new wine, the wine that will be going into the barrels and vats to ferment and hopefully be the next big year. The Neuer wine is a pretty cloudy, sweet, grape juice. Really not something you'd take home to enjoy. One interesting thing about this little festival, which was no larger than a small parking lot, two beer stands. You'd think one would be enough but why chance it. Here's Jeff checking out the beer. He said two beer stands are ALWAYS better than one.

If you look over Jeff's right shoulder you'll see a large pole covered with multicolored strips of paper. That pole is part of the celebration of the Neuer wine. When the Neuer wine is ready to be sampled a new pole goes up with all the colorfull paper. That pole will be there all year until the next Neuer wine becomes available. During the course of the year the colors will fade in the sun and the rain until the paper on the pole is almost completely white.

So the three-day Labor Day weekend ended with four festivals visited. A good effort. Kind of a labor of love.