a day in the life; foreign reporting

I awoke this morning at a strange hour – 02:45 local time to be exact, hoping of course to catch the action of the world junior hockey final. It seemed it was intermission, from what I could make out in Czech, so I hit the iSnooze and awoke to the next digital jingle – just in time to catch the start of overtime, and the subsequent slaying of the Canadians off the stick of the young American. I went back to sleep, devastated. I had told my American journalist friends last night – over dinner at some tiny beer hall down some cobbled medieval lane - that they were sure to lose.

I remember sitting up five years ago in Granada, Spain, listening to Canada win their first in a string of five successive championships on the radio. I told the story of us celebrating the championship from Spain to a friend who was the goaltender of that championship team – we both that was pretty cool. Anyways, back to the point....

My day actually started at a more acceptable hour – 06:15 – when I awoke to get ready for a train trip into rural Bohemia. I grabbed a shower and a double espresso, and then ate my baguette breakfast at the tram stop, trying to stay warm as the snow came down again in seriously freezing temperatures.

I was headed out to meet a biodynamic wine producer, and learn about Bohemian wine making, in Kutna Hora, a medieval mining town which one rivalled Prague for prominence and beauty. Wine making in Bohemia goes back many centuries, to when Charles IV imported Pinot Noir vines from Burgundy.

The train ride out to the country aboard one of those Communist-era trains I’ve come to love so much was quiet and pleasant. I wrote a few lines and looked out on endless fields of mud and snow. A ginger-haired Canadian picked me up in a shiny Skoda at the crumbling and desolate train station on this grey and dreary Central European morning.

Jake, the Canadian lad, was actually born in this wee village, and had accompanied his grandmother back home after her visit to Toronto, and decided to stay a while, as a way of retracing his roots and clearing his head through honest labour as he had put it. His family had escaped to Canada via Hungary and the former Yugoslavia, before the fall of Communism and the Velvet Revolution (which created the Czech Republic), and has been coming back to the village ever since.

Jake has developed quite the palette and passion for vino, and it wasn’t hard to see why upon meeting the proprietor and wine maker of this family company of 6 employees. Lukas was a brilliant host, and a clear wizard in the ways of organic wine making. We tasted wine at around 10:00, and did so for about an hour, in Lukas’ cold and damp wine cellar beneath the medieval monastery in town.

My day continued to revolve around vino, as I met a famous Czech sommelier and wine columnist in a cellar housed in the Charles Bridge to drink some more Czech Pinot Noir...

More to follow; off to a Jazz concert tonight in, you guessed it, another medieval cellar. Life as a foreign correspondent is rough.

Best,

D.C.B