Blog From Zurich

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With the snow-capped Alps in the far distance, the ridgeline of the mountains is sharp and clear.The village of which I took a picture a few weeks ago, must be beautiful in the deep fall colors.

Dairy farmers who made cheese in the mountain lodges in the Alps meadows during summer, come back to the villages at the foot of the mountain, bringing cows with them. The cows are decorated with colorful flowers and special costumes, and walk through the village ringing the bells. This is called “cow parade” descending the mountains. At the Chästeilet (which literally means “dividing of the chees”) Festival held in the village, the faramers divide the piled-up huge round cheeses to the dairy farmers depending on the amount of milk they used. It is a traditional festival seen in various areas in the Alps.

Out of the milk from one cow, approximately 6 pieces of huge cheese, weighing more than 10 kg, can be made during one summer. I understand they have a traditional method of calculation, telling which cow of which farmer has given so much milk. This seriousness really sounds like Swiss.

Once I have seen this festival in a very thick photo book. Under a clear blue sky, they wear traditional clothes and hats handed down through generations in the village, and proudly carry the cheeses. I thought it would be great to meet some cattleman with a deep wrinkled face, a mustache, and mysterious eyes just like a mountain avatar.

I searched in the Internet and made a phone call to the department that looked appropriate. It seemed 2 weeks too early for the “Cheese Dividing Festival.” However, I was told that there is a small dairy farm house that gives away, not divide, cheese over the weekend. As the weather turned out beautiful, we decided to go for a drive to the Alps.

By train, the station you get off is Zweisimmen in the Province of Bern. It is well known as a summer and ski resort.From here, you may take the mail bus, which runs one every hour, to get to the house, the venue of this day. However, this place was farther from our place than we had expected, and due to the gridlock on the way, we missed this bus.

“We have to drive very close to the edge of the cliff roads without guardrails. It can be quite dangerous driving such winding roads,” said my husband, who had weakness in heights, and much hesitated to drive. Wether we would wait for 1 hour or drive up the road. Consequently we decided to drive and we input the address on the navigator, but it did not show on the map because it was such a small village. Before long, we came to a halt.

We were lost, and asked some people who were resting in the middle of their walks. They said, “Go back a little, and turn at the water fountain; we think that’s the place you’re looking for.”

1800 meters above sea level. The chorus of yodel started to surround us. The language might be ancient Swiss German. Although I was not able to hear the words, the voices of the singing group of 10 people wearing sky-blue uniforms, echoed in the Alps and reverberated in transparent vibrato.
Huge mountains standing in front of us, scattered houses, green farmlands, and plants and flowers in the plateau. The tone resonating to the wild nature was too beautiful, and it touched my heart like somewhere unknown, which made me very emotional.

Although it was before lunchtime, wooden tables and benches were almost full. We were able to sit where we could see the mountains in front of us, and we ordered the local beer, cheese, and fresh ham.

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Although people gathered together, it had a quiet atmosphere just like a pre-celebration. We came to realize that this was the house that produced the cheese for the village. We were guided to the storage where all the cheeses were neatly arranged side by side.

The person who guided us was the eldest son of Mr. Santschi, who provided this venue that day. We learned that his morning ritual included soaking a total of 800 round cheeses, each weighing 15 kg, into the salt water then placing them back into the original locations.
There is a famous sport called , which is like a cross of Sumo and wrestling, originated from the Alps kids’ play. It is a fighting sport and Swiss national sport where you swing your oponent around to put him down. He was a player of this sport. We saw him as a macho man with muscled chest, but we realized that he trained himself with cheese, instead of dumbbells, every morning.

We were given some share of this year’s cheese from the storage, and we went back down slowly, enjoying looking at the cows eating grass or taking a nap with the Alps in the background.

Every house and store in the small town at the foot of the mountain had full of red or pink geraniums, which were gently in harmony with the delicately carved preserved wooden architecture that is unique to this region.

As Switzerland has unique breads by each region, we dropped in at one bread shop first. Here, we got the address of a cheese shop of this town.
We selected Gruyere, Emmental, Reblochon, goat cheese, and fruit cheese.

That night, we tried those cheeses with figs and grapes for dinner with our guests from Germany, to go with La Côte, white wine from the Lake Geneva. Every cheese demonstrated wonderful flavor.

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Downloaded the photos into my computer, I clicked sceneries that were postcard-like even when cut at any angle.

While Zurich is the largest city in Switzerland, I feel things move slowly compared to Tokyo. The biggest difference is the fact that we have forests and lakes within the city. Even on boulevards, you see spring water everywhere, and you can bring your lips closer to drink. It is crisp and cold, the water from the mountains.

People here fully enjoy weekends, and days for annual paid vacation is 50 days or longer. Having said that, the stress level suffered by the people working in the center of this financial world is abnormally high. I hear that those men who wish to quietly move to a remote village in the Alps and become “cattlemen” are not a minority.

I cannot imagine the severity of the Alps when locked in the snow, and I don’t believe that cows will be cooperative all the time.

Although I understand that most of them fail during the apprenticeship and return to the city, one former elite banker in his 40s was introduced as a success story on TV. He lives with cows, has leaned how to make cheese, and have become a successful farmer living in the Alps.

One Sunday afternoon, I had a chance to go to the forest.
Although the Lake Zurich is nearby, you can easily access to the forest within walking distance from the central area of the city. Walking or jogging in the forest has become part of our daily life here.

The place I went this day was along the shore of the Lake Zurich. The forest was stretched out near my friend’s house. “Well, the weather turned out just wonderful,” a smiling blond intellectual-looking young man said, looking up the rainy sky.

Holding hands with a small boy wearing rain boots, singing German song that I had no clue what it meant, we climbed up the hill slowly, by walking over the fallen leaves. When we turned into a small lane, my tip of nose sensed something refreshing. I breathed in the deep smell of the forest. Once more, I breathed deeper. Numerous lofty trees connected the earth and the sky.

The moist air from the drizzle in the morning fallen on the ground, and everywhere was filled with this moist air. When crossing the stream, you could feel some slippery touch underneath the shoes. Big and small pebbles here and there were covered with soft moss. They walked through easily by stepping the stones one after another. Once in a while, small breaking sounds of twigs were heard.

Today’s goal is to make a fire in the forest, and to grill big sausages called Bratwurst.

We all spread out in the forest to find some long branches. What would happen to someone like me who had never had anything to do with the life in the mountains or forests, when participating in such an unfamiliar event and faced such an unknown situation?

Feeling simply impressed with the fact that these people have been living in touch with nature since their childhood, and at the same time, being fully aware that I would be no use here at this moment, I silently became the keeper for the Bratwurst. No, it may not be true. As a matter of fact, I did not know what to do. I was just wandering around.

While the army knife of VICTRINOX is well-known in Japan, everybody here has a well-used knife of his own. Taking them out of their pockets, they skillfully made skewers by sharpening the tip of the branches.

I have heard about the story that Swiss children go to barbecues by carrying one sausage of their own, and now I realized this would be the adult version.

It might not be wrong to say that most of the people working in Zurich spend their weekends in the forest in a varied form of this kind.

I wondered if this was the forest frequently visited by the people in the neighborhood. Stones were already piled up. We saw branches of beech tree, larch, and popular and so on. While placing thick trunks, we horizontally poked each “own” Bratwurst into the sharpend tips of the branches mentioned earlier.

Although I felt poking them vertically would be easier to eat, there must be some reason whey they placed them horizontally. Everybody had their own way of making cuts on their sausages. That, also might be their tradition of each family.

Let me repeat, you grill you own. More specifically, you change the angles to roast. Sitting on a fallen tree, by checking the directions of the wind and smoke, you put out your stick over the burning fire.

I found a big stone nearby which could turn to a table. When your own Bratwurst turns to nice brown color, just take it there.

Now I somehow understood the reason whey they had been placed horizontally, instead of vertically. However, they took them out of the sticks. Nicely browned Bratwurst sausages were, of course, very hot. But they grabbed them by hand to eat!!

Still this way of eating food exists in the present time, like a tail of ancient days. What a primitive but wonderful way. To me, grabbing the food to eat in a situation like this, looked very cool. Feeling the closeness of comrades, I simply imitated their ritual.

Around the fire, tranquil and comfortable time went by.

Out of nowhere, appeared some boys with flushed faces. Although this area is not far from town, there may be some secret lanes deep in the forest for these boys.

Connoisseurs of fine wines may know this. There are many great wines in Switzerland. Furthermore, as the types and characters of grapes vary depending on the area where the language is spoken, a vast variety of wine was born.

When I went to the jazz festival in Montreux, I had a chance to taste the white of Laveaux, which was just wonderful. Well-known places for white wine using Chasselas grapes are Vaud near the Lake Leman, as well as Valais in its south and along the Lake Neuchâtel near the French border.
When you talk about the red, white and rose of Merlot, it will be Ticino in the area where Italian is spoken. Where you can find wines that share similar tastes of Pinot Noir or Pinot Gris from French Alsace, or that from Baden in Germany, will be around the Lake Zurich and the western Switzerland. Just for your information, we also have what we call, Zurich wine.

I hear that some grapes that were planted in the Roman Era are still grown. It is really amazing to know that tens of different kinds of grapes are grown in the wine regions in this country which is about the same size as Kyushu.

Why there aren’t many Swiss wines in Japan where gourmet foods collected from around the world?

That is because the Swiss love wine very much. It does not mean that we do not export any, but since the people here drink wine 3 times the quantity of the domestic production, as a matter of fact, and the shortage has brought more and more imported wines. I thought that they did not want to share something delicious with other countries, but now I understand what the reason was. First of all, the grapes grown on the land where machines are hardly used because of its steep slopes, are only picked up by human hands, and also because it requires lot of traditional manual methods to make wine, they are overwhelmingly in short supply.

It seems like these conditions are the background. For the 2 weeks up to the mid November, just to be in time for Christmas, Zurich holds a large-scale wine exhibition every year.

From Bürkliplatz where Old Town and the financial district meet, not only sightseeing boats but also commuter boats run to various places. The annual EXPOVINA, commonly known as Weinshiff, is held here, by having 12 boats lined-up and anchored at this old pier near the Lake Zurich. It is open to public and it is the world’s largest wine expo. It stared in 1953 and this year celebrated the 56th anniversary.
More than 120 booths of wine producers and importers, were set up in the 12 boats. When it comes to the number of different types of wine, it will be easily 4000 at the least.

Carrying the catalogue given at the entrance, you go around the booths you wanted to try, and after tasting, you check those names corresponding to the booth numbers that you liked, to put down the points.

Having visited several times in the past years, I thought I was starting to get the hand of it. However, since the number of displayed wines is tremendous, it is too audacious to think about completing the tour of the whole 12 boats including the one that turned to a Swiss restaurant, in a single day. Your tongue, nose and inside your mouth will become blunt for judgment, or in other words, in my case, you cannot trust your taste buds any longer.

This year, there was somewhat unusual Spanish Rioja in the very left boat, but since the boat was swinging due to its small size, we moved on quickly to the next boat. Although other boats were anchored steadily and no worries of sea sickness, once you started from fruity white, by listening to the explanations by the dealers, and moved on by thinking “Well, next I should try a little heavier red” and so on, you would feel too great and your spirits would be high after you have tried the 10th one.

First, I went with my friend who was a wine-tasting professional to go around. However, I did not decide on certain label that day, and went back again on a different day for more focused direction, to try some interesting ones that I usually do not drink.

What we wanted to go after was German white. Baden, Pfalz, Saar, Rheinhessen, Rheingau, and Mosel, we tasted along the Rhein. While I always thought that German wines were sweet, tasting those wines made me realize that my knowledge was too premature. There were many bottles that demonstrated refreshing, deep, and elegant tastes.

Finally what we decided was Sheurebe of Mosel and Riesling, as well as a sweet one of Sheurebe which gave us the impression to be the one to taste after the Christmas dinner.

Although 6 bottles were the minimum to order in general, some booth started to be more flexible so that we could mix 6 different bottles for one order.

It was Friday night. In addition to some relaxed couples, people after work started to join us.
Very attractive 2 women, assumed still in their 20s, were asking the dealer many detailed questions one after another. Over there, one young man with backpack was taking notes, while a senior couple was relaxed and enjoying the conversation at the counter, checking the list.

We moved around the Swiss wine section, but the surroundings of popular wines turned into a place for social interaction. It was so jammed that we changed our direction to Italy.

Although the order was totally reverse, we were able to take a break with chilled Prosecco, an Italian sparkling wine, which we casually order as aperitif in restaurants in Zurich.

We sorted out our cellar in the basement to welcome those wines we ordered, but still waiting for their arrival.