Come September many Romanians turn to one of the most popular traditions of the fall season: making their own wine at home. We call it “house wine” (“vin de casă” in Romanian) to differentiate it from the one you buy from the supermarket. And since most people living in Bucharest have a small yard with only a few vines or have none at all if they live in an apartment, they supplement or procure the raw material by buying grapes at the market. For 0.35 euro per kilogram (or $0.5 per kilogram) you can buy, as the sign reads, “Grapes for making wine” a mixture of 3 types of grapes which are also listed. Making wine is also a great ocasion for socializing. People invite you to help pick the grapes or assist in wine making which is sometimes a good excuse for family and friends to meet and have fun together – not that in Romania we need excuses to meet and have fun 🙂
Sep 162009
always curious about wine making. that sounds fun!
and look at those abundant grapes!
It happened a lot here when I was younger and was very funny, now people are more lazy and drink less wine.
I am still amazed how some Romanian words and phrases sound familiar, if not identical, to Italian or Latin, while other words are utterly different. Vin de casa in Italian will be vino di casa.
Vogon Poet: I did a bit of reading on Romanian language on wikipedia as I was curious to know what percentage of our vocabulary is Latin based. They say that about about 75%-85% of Romanian words can be traced to Latin but of those words about 35% were imported directly from French or Italian. The words that you don't understand are most likely of Slavic origin, which is about 25% of the vocabulary. I also found this at wikipedia, and from personal experience I can attest to it being true: "Compared with the other Romance languages, the closest relative of Romanian is Italian; the two languages show a limited degree of asymmetrical mutual intelligibility, especially in their cultivated forms: speakers of Romanian seem to understand Italian more easily than the other way around." I think that it's a bit harder for you guys to understand us because of the Slavic influence but I can tell you that it's relatively easy for me to understand Italian (much easier than Spanish, French, Portuguese or Catalan)
I think you are right, without knowing the languages I know many words from other Slavic tongues and probably this helps me to increase a bit the percentage. It's easier with signs and plaques…
This is interesting! I would not have expected that even people in big cities like Bucharest make their own wine.
The little chat with Vogon Poet was very educating, Romanian seems often to be forgotten when it comes to languages with Latin origin.