Bad Durkheim - Wine Fest

So on Saturday evening, our WONDERFUL friend, Porchea took our two boys to spend the night and give us a date night!!  So we headed off to the biggest wine fest the world!  It is only about a 45 minute drive from our house - so nice and close!!  It has been celebrated for 590 years, it started as a fair for local farmers and wine growers but now it attracts more than 600,000 visitors annually.  They had over 150 different wines to try if you wanted to.  I only tried two different ones because I was extremely overwhelmed with all the wines. 

 

Starting out the evening - you can see some of the vineyards behind us!!  :-)

 

David checking out the local produce  ;-)

 

And of course me with the grapes - soon to be yummy wine

 

There is the festival in the distance, we had to park a little ways out because we didn't get there until around 5:30 pm.  But that was okay with us, we completely enjoyed the walk in.

 

Every fest we have gone to in Europe has had at least one huge Ferris wheel if not two!  I have yet to go on one.

 

I couldn't help myself since it was the color of the Seahawks!!  David said it was great with my blue shirt and I should get it for our next Seahawks game we go to!  I choose not to at this point, but maybe next time.  ;-)

 

We walked a ways and found a cute little park and took a little break enjoying the scenery

 

What fest would be complete without a band - these guys were great!!  Behind them were some guys dancing a little crazy and both David and I turned to each other and said they are probably Americans.  And they were.  That is the one problem, there are quite a few that give us a bad name over here, especially when it comes to things like these. 

 

My first glass of wine at the wine fest!  It was a good one too!!  I chose it because I liked the glass.  I really had no idea on how to pick out the wine, I really need to work on my wines!  :-)

 

 

The landmark of the Wurstmarkt is the world's largest wine barrel; it can hold 44 million gallons of wine, but has been transformed into a multi-level wine shop. 

 

Here is what looked like to be a really, really fun ride!!!  David isn't as much into the rides as I am, so we stayed away from them.  They are also really, really expensive and so we passed and just enjoyed ourselves walking around and checking out the scenery!

 

This is one of the wine tents.  When we first went in there during the beginning of the night, there was only about a half dozen people standing on the chairs - as you can see now there are way more and this was only half the tent, the other half had this many if not more standing up!  And this was only one of three large tents like this.

 

We also saw a lot of this, I don't think you can see it well, but this guy said forget the glass and he is drinking straight out of the bottle.  There were so many people just drinking out of the bottles, it was hilarious!

 

That is the swings that I thought would also be fun!!  Look at the height on them?  I think David said about 100 feet or more.

 

We didn't stay really late, we had some great dinner, I had a great glass of wine, we laughed and enjoyed ourselves and were ready to head home.  As you can see I had to get a bottle of wine at the wine fest!  It was great fun and we really appreciated Porchea taking the kids for the night!!!