San Vino – The Wine Throwing Festival

Hannah Buck is a Connect-123 Barcelona journalism intern this summer.  Click here to learn more about Hannah, and keep reading for her account of the San Vino festival!

I kicked off my first festival – the one and only wine fight on a mountain in Spain, San Vino – by lugging lots of heavy boxes from the Stoke office, down the five stories worth of tiny winding staircase and packing them onto the coach. This took longer than expected due to the fact that the coach driver didn’t understand the words ‘Stoke Travel’ in a non-Spanish accent and therefore kept refusing our requests to get on the bus, insisting it wasn’t for us.

So, beer in hand, we commenced the 6 hour journey from Barcelona to Haro, a tiny town surrounded by sweeping vineyards and crooked hilltops where all the locals would soon cram themselves into the central square for a night-long street party. We eventually rocked up at the campsite where other Stoke wine warriors were already sizzling burgers on the barbecue and helping themselves to ladlefuls of sangria. In all the chaos they had accidentally forgotten to provide the all-important (for me) vegetarian option… but this was more than compensated for by a free pizza and chips from the campsite restaurant. After stuffing my face and washing it down with a hearty mix of sangria and beer I trooped up the hill to the town centre along with my sixty-or-so fellow wine fighters.                        

The Spanish don’t do things by half and the square was rammed, especially since they’d squeezed in a huge stage and everyone was pushing forward to get a better view of all the assorted acrobatics/dancing/Michael Jackson impersonation acts that the inhabitants had decided befitted a wine throwing festival. The night was spent squeezing through the crowds, bumping into various new faces from the campsite, confusing the locals for new faces from the campsite and attempting to copy all the dance routines Spanish people make for chart songs. By about 4 am I decided 2 hours’ sleep was better than none (6.30am start means that most people don’t even bother) and I stumbled back down the hill to my tent, quick faceplant and bleeding knee included.

Getting up again after what seemed like 10 minutes was painful. I dragged myself out of my sagging un-pegged tent and promptly tripped over a pile of tent with two dirty feet sticking out the bottom that was lying outside my door. Clearly someone was even worse at putting up tents than I was. When he didn’t react to me falling on him I was a bit concerned he might be dead. I unwrapped him to make sure he wasn’t but I didn’t stay to see if he made it to the wine fight (suspect not).

As the coach crept up the cool shadowy hillside to the battlefield, there were troops of locals making their way through the wheat fields, dressed head to toe in white and laden with wine bags, water pistols, buckets, hoses, and lots and lots of red wine. As we drove past they would turn to watch us, with menacing grins glowing in the golden sunlight. The air was fresher than expected when I reluctantly stepped off the bus and there seemed to be children lurking in every bush, water gun at the ready.                        

As we had arrived slightly early the wine fight hadn’t officially started and we managed to climb up into the trees and reach the main area relatively unscathed. I noticed with dismay that the locals seemed to have constructed various contraptions involving backpacks, tubing and some form of pistol. I had definitely under-prepared at the camp and had equipped myself with one measly box of wine. This was NOT enough.

If you’re considering coming to San Vino next year, do not make the mistake of underestimating the brutality of a Spaniard at a wine throwing party. They will not spare you because you’re small/female/shivering/crying in pain from having wine shot into your eyes. They are wine throwing machines. They will catch you while you’re off guard, approach you from behind while you’re trying to tear open a new box of wine, and drench you in gallons of the sweet purple liquid. Seemingly harmless OAPs wander through groups of people, and then stop and with an expressionless face begin to pummel them with a constant spray from their bursting wine bags. Five year olds perch up the bank and shoot at you from all directions. After the initial Mexican standoff a brass band started up (?!) and suddenly we were entered into a devilish hurricane of flying alcohol.

Attacking strangers is not considered weird and you are doing yourself no favours by turning on your friends (although it is strongly encouraged). There are massive wagons where floods of locals go to fill up their barrels with fresh steaming wine, but if you try to sneak in the queue they can sniff you out and you will find yourself bombarded with barrelfuls of said wine and you will have to crawl, blinded, back up the bank, spluttering from the attack. After half an hour or so of dodging suspicious characters we were dragged into a swell of drenched purple bodies, all jumping and yelling the first phrase from Seven Nation Army over and over again (strangely this seems to be a favourite pastime of all Spanish people, whether at a football match or not). I got slapped round the face by discarded t-shirts and showered constantly with tiny black droplets.                          

San Vino is a vicious and outrageous war and you would naïve if you thought you could avoid ruining every item of clothing you’re wearing, dying your entire body purple for a few days or if you thought it was possible to find some sort of escape from the madness amongst the vines. Some infuriating little brat with a wine bag twice the size of them will always seek you out. So it’s best to close your eyes, dive in, throw as much vino tinto as is humanly possible and embrace the chanting, no matter how maddening it is that they never progress onto the next part of the song.