Last Saturday we went to a vendimia festival to celebrate the fall grape harvest. The festival was in the tiny town of Rahuil, which is in the coastal mountains between Chillán and Concepción. We went with Pam, our friend and fellow Fulbrighter here in Chillán, and she in turn was the guest of Don Jorge, the principal of the K-8 school in Rahuil. Pam had donated some books to the school the week before, and Jorge had invited her to come back and be part of the vendimia.We started off the morning by driving west on paved roads for about an hour, then turned on to a dirt road in the small town of Rafael. We were headed for the school in Rahuil, where we were supposed to find some people who could tell us the way to the actual festival. Pam had been as far as the school once before, but luckily we picked up a couple of young hitchhikers who helped us find the way among the many branches of the dirt roads. We got to the school alright, but there was no one there. Our cell phones couldn't pick up a signal out there, and the phone booth at the school didn't work either. So, we kept driving, stopping to ask directions from a couple of farmers in their field, and at one point waited for 10 minutes at a crossroads for a car to come by. The people in that car knew exactly where to go, and they told us to follow them. Sure enough, after 15 minutes and a couple of obscure turns onto increasingly narrow and rutted roads, we arrived at the Rahuil community soccer field where the festival was just getting going. (I admit at this point I was wondering how we were ever going to find our way out of there and back to the main road...but hey, this is Chile, so I figured it would all work out. Worse case, we sit at a confusing fork in the road until someone comes by and ask directions.)
A large tent had been set up, and maybe a hundred people were listening to a traditional music group and cueca dancers. We met Don Jorge and his wife Patricia and their kids, and felt warmly welcomed. Pam was asked to say a few words into the microphone and also do a brief interview for a television film crew that was there. Although we were clearly the outsiders in this small town fiesta, we felt welcomed and accepted. 
Soon, most of the crowd, including us, headed out of the tent and up into the nearest vineyard, lugging wooden boxes to pick grapes. Along with us was a ox cart with a large wooden half-barrel. Everyone was picking grapes (and eating them too) and dumping their boxes into the cart. The vines in the vineyards around there were low to the ground and growing close together. The contrast with the laser-straight manicured vineyards of the large industrial wineries in much of Chile was striking. I felt like we were seeing the way grapes have traditionally been grown by small towns for centuries. This was, as they say in Chile, campo campo, the real countryside.Within 30 minutes or so the cart was full and the crowd made its way back to the tent for lunch. Also at this time large green jugs of chicha, a mildly-fermented freshly-pressed grape juice similar to apple cider, was making the rounds. It was quite delicious, and I'm guessing that people have been drinking some form of chicha around the world as long as they have been harvesting grapes, going back thousands of years.
After lunch we rested for awhile in the shade of a nearby grove of pine trees (it was over 90 degrees in the sun by that time). After about an hour, the festivities started up again. Another large half-barrel had been set up under the tent, and across the top of the barrel were slats of bamboo. The idea was to crush the grapes with your feet so that the juice would drop through the slats into the barrel. Actually, there was a contest to see which team of two people could do the stomping with the most style. With dance music blaring through the speakers, the contestants held on to ropes overhead to steady themselves while dancing a merry jig on the grapes. The crowd applauded their efforts heartily. Below is a video of the winning team.
Around 5:00 we decided to leave with Douglas and Marisol to catch a ride to Concepción where we could catch the bus back to Chillán. Before leaving I bought a 2 liter plastic bottle of chicha being sold from the back of a pickup truck in the parking lot. The woman selling it warned me to release the pressure inside periodically or the whole bottle might explode. On the ride back on the bus I found myself carefully untwisting the bottle top slightly to allow a hisssss of pressure to release. Back home in Chillán, sitting in our refrigerator, the chicha has continued to get a little stronger each day as the fermentation proceeds. Each sip takes me back to the festival and connects me to the ancient history of harvest festivals, and especially to the grape harvest festivals. I feel like we could have been in an ancient Greek valley in 400 BC and it wouldn't have been too different from what we experienced in Chile in 2007. It was a timeless combination of the grape harvest, small-town neighbors, good food and drink, music, and laughter. Gracias a la vida.
To see more photos of the day, click on this link
