Casa De Morrill

So there was a slight change of plans this weekend. Originally, we were going to wake up Saturday morning, be lazy for a bit, go run errands, and then go out to eat before heading to the Jimmy Eat World/ The Killers concert. Instead…

Saturday morning we woke up, fixed breakfast and curled up on the couch, as is our usual tradition, to read the newspaper and drink tea. While reading the newspaper, we remembered that we needed to check on how to get into this concert (it’s not really a limited seating area; it’s just beside the lake in Tempe). Sean scours the internet and can not find any explanation on how to get into the concert. Great. The only phone number we can find only gives us details about the golf tournament earlier in the day. We were prepared to go down to Tempe and hunt down more details, but wanted to establish a backup plan if that didn’t work. I present to you the backup plan…

Grape squishing. Yes, you read that right. There’s a local winery called Kokopelli Wines. Every autumn, right around harvest time, they have a big celebration called Kokopelli Krush. It’s a much smaller but similar celebration to what the French do at grape harvesting time. One of the parts of this celebration are grape stomping contests. Two-person teams competing against the clock to see how many grapes they can squish. We’d never done it before, so we thought we’d go down and give it a try. We never were able to get more information about the concert, so we went for the grape squishing option. That evening, around 6pm, we showed up at the Krush and gave our names as contestants. There were about 15 other couples competing against us. The prize? A case of wine and $100 gift certificate at one of their winery/bistros. We had an hour to kill before the actual competition, so we mingled around, tasted some wines and relaxed. Our estimation of the wines is that their decent, but there’s nothing outstanding about them except for the Royal Kir and the Cabernet Sauvignon Reserve.

7pm rolled around and everyone wandered out back to watch and cheer on the grape squishing teams. There were three barrels. Teams competed three at a time. You squished a set amount of grapes for 2 minutes. They then filtered out the juice and weighed the juice. Most weight wins. We were in the third set of teams competing so we watched and cheered and considered our strategy. Sean was the squisher, I was the runner (brought the grapes to the barrel). Finally, it was our turn. Sean and I took our shoes off, rolled up our pants and got prepared. The next two minutes of our lives were chaotic but hysterical. I ran grapes to the barrel as fast as possible. Once all the grapes were in, I helped him squish by reaching my hands in and squishing grapes by hand. I have never had so much messy fun in my life. My arms were incredibly sticky by the end of it, but it was a blast. Out of 15 teams, we placed 4th. Not bad for this being our first year and never having seen this done in our lives.

Afterwards, we wandered down the street to a cozy little Italian restaurant and had a great meal, even if my arms were still a little sticky (they did have a place for us to wash off, but let me tell you, grape juice is really hard to rinse off). Full and still a little giggly from the contest, we drove back home with the wind in our hair. I took a shower before curling up with a warm mug of chai and a quiet, late night. It wasn’t by any means a great concert (we’ll see those two bands another time), but it was still an absolute blast. Besides, how many people can say that they squished grapes?