Curico Wine Festival

This past Saturday we took a trip to the Curico, a town about an hour north of Talca by bus.  They were holding their annual wine festival in their central plaza, a plaza that the Rough Guide to Chile calls the "most beautiful plaza in Chile."  Wine festival in the prettiest plaza in Chile?  It sounded like our kind of scene, so we caught the bus north on Saturday morning.

Talca has a very compact city center, and to get from the bus station to the plaza we simply walked half a dozen blocks.  In the plaza there were booths set up around the the plaza selling wine tastings and food(of which the most popular item was several hunks of pork on a stick).  Wine tastings were 500 chilean pesos, which amounts to a little less than a dollar.  A bunch of meat on a stick was 1000p, which I felt was a pretty good deal.  The wine?  Yeah, it was good.  Like we'd know if wasn't.  My favorite drinks were the strawberry and honeydew melon juices that I bought at the end of the day.

In one corner of the plaza was a large stage.  Upon this stage Miss Curico Wine Festival was weighed in front of thouisands of people.  She weighed 52 full wine bottles.  After Miss Curico Wine Festival left the stage, a Colombian folklorico band played, and then the main event came on.  There were five teams of five people, who for seven minutes, squashed as much grape juice as they could with their feet in wooden tubs.  Only two people could stand in the tub at a time, so another person shoveled in grapes, and the other two took small buckets of grape juice that came out of a spigot in the wooden bucket to a large plastic measuring bucket.  It was phenomenal.

Tomorrow, we leave for a weekend in Vina del Mar to celebrate another teaching assistant's birthday.