Zoe gets her hands dirty in the vineyards

Through API, we had a wonderful volunteer opportunity, which was called “tirer le bois”. We went to a vineyard in Savoie where we helped clear the vines from the past season. It was a relatively simple task, but there were rows among rows to work on! It was a lot of doing the same thing, but it was with other students studying here in Grenoble, some of whom I didn’t know yet, so it was a lot of fun getting to work together!

 It was a long day, we arrived around 9 am and didn’t leave until about 5 pm. However we had a wonderful picnic on the middle of the day, so it broke up the work. We had sandwiches and the people from the vineyard gave us different wines to taste! Considering we were in Savioe, they were all white wines and they were all so good. There was a really interesting wine that is frozen in the snow and then when it’s unfrozen it’s more concentrated and much sweeter than normal white wines. So it’s something that you would only drink on occasion and with dessert, but I am really glad that I got to try it. The vineyard we worked at said that they actually had a patent on it. They also had grape juice that was just as good as the wine. When we were working, the rows were so muddy, so we all left tired and caked in mud, but it was a wonderful experience! In the end we actually ended up raising over 1,000 Euros to help handicap children in a neighboring town.

--Zoë