Harvest Festival

Despite fears that you will all think this blog is marking my progress away from cycling and toward alcoholism, I wanted to post a post about our trip yesterday to the Ashikaga Coco Farm and Winery Harvest festival. I haven't been riding lately due to inclement weather and a tenacious cold I had a few weeks back, so I haven't had much material to post. We had so much fun yesterday, however, that I thought it would be nice to share.

Ashikaga is a town in the southern foothills of the mountains of Nikko. It is famously the hometown of the Ashikaga family of Shoguns who ruled Japan for a few hundred years beginning in the fourteenth century, but now it's not really famous for anything at all--just another post-industrial town in the hinterlands. Or so I thought. Apparently, it's also becoming famous for its wine. To be more specific, it's famous for the Coco Farm and Winery, a vineyard that was started in the 1950s as a project of a local junior high school special education class. I'm not clear on all the details of the story, but from those beginnings the project grew into a full fledged winery managed by an American vintner and a home and school for people with mental disabilities. The students and residents of the home care for the vines and do much of the wine making themselves, and the winery has grown into a sustainable business. This year is the 24th
year of the winery's Harvest Festival, and Tomo and I were invited by two of her good friends from university. None of us had been before and we didn't know what to expect, but within a few minutes of arrival we were already talking about making it an annual tradition! Basically, the Festival was just what you might imagine from the name and from the pictures--thousands of people getting together to enjoy good food and good wine under the vines. The vineyard is on a hillside that looks out into a picturesque valley. It's hard to imagine a more pleasant place to spend an afternoon. The culinary highlight of the day, along with a great loaf of country bread and French cheese, was the freshly fermented wine that reminded me of nothing more than the sidra of Asturias. Sidra of course is made from apples rather than grapes, but the wine had the same fruity earthiness and the same freshness that I have never tasted in any of the ciders bottled for export that I have tried. It's funny that when I was in Spain in high school and college and everyone else wanted me to drink lots of the sidra I wasn't interested and that yesterday I was tremendously excited to revisit that flavor. But more than the delicious food, it was just so much fun to be together with friends in a beautiful place, with lots of other people who were happy to be there (and much better behaved than a drunken crowd might have been anywhere else). I'm surrounded by crowds daily and the absence of any sense of community is draining. How good it was to be with people and to feel a sense of togetherness.

And good, too, to see the pride of the wine makers!