Spanish views from a small town

A person who says they're not superstitious is lying if they are saying it on New Year's Day. Very, very few people exist in Spain who have never tried to eat twelve grapes at the stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve. Or gum drops, or mandarin wedges, or anything else that can be eaten in twelve small pieces. Then there are those who scoff at black cats, yet wear red underwear to usher in the new year. That's just a couple of the more common, automatic, superstitions.  The red underwear was imported from Italy. The twelve grapes is purely Spanish. It began at the end of the nineteenth century. At first it was a private, bourgeois affair. The well-to-do middle class of Madrid would eat grapes and drink champagne in the evening on New Year's Eve. Apparently it was a custom imported from France and Germany. At that time it was the custom for madrileños of mostly the lower classes to go out and "search for the Magi" on the fifth of January. It was mostly an...

It's past the middle of September and the grapes are already ripe. People have been picking them these past couple of weeks to make their own wine at home. We could hear our neighbors under their grape arbor this past weekend, talking and laughing as they picked the grapes. Though the grapes aren't for them, since they don't make wine. A relative has taken them. The big wineries have almost finished by now, but the local families are still starting to make their wine. We don't make wine any more. My father is the only one who used to drink it, and now he can't drink more than a glass every other day. If a brother-in-law doesn't come to pick the grapes, the birds and the wasps will take care of them. Our variety doesn't make the best wine. It's called catalan , and I assume that's because after the philoxera decimated the local varieties at the begining of the twentieth century that variety was brought from Catalunya because it was resistent. We hav...