Personalities of grapeness

By KURT NESBITT

Journal Staff Writer

CAMBRIA -- Wanted: Groups of people from the areas around New Ulm who are willing to come up with a team concept, a costume and go out on a limb to squish grapes the old-fashioned, barefooted way.

Whoever squeezes out the most juice gets a case of wine. And the team with the most creative costumes wins a bottle of the stuff.

Plenty of people answered that annual call Saturday afternoon as they made their way down State Highway 68 and through a few miles of country roads to Morgan Creek Vineyards and Winery for the annual Cambria Crush grape stomp.

"Part of the goal with the winery is that it celebrates the seasons," said Morgan Creek co-owner and winemaker Georg Marti. "What we're doing is celebrating the harvest here and the stomp is the way of doing that."

Saturday afternoon found visitors parking their cars in farm fields and hopping New Ulm school buses for short trips out to the site. Once there, lines formed for the oven-baked pizzas and the free wine tastings as well as the cashier's stand in the shop.

The lawn between the building on the top of the hill and the barn at the bottom served as a kind of amphitheater as the visitors spread out on blankets and folding chairs as the Minnesota Traditional Morris Dancers and the Sun Moon Belly Dancers entertained between the stomp's two heats.

Before each heat, co-owner Paula Marti gathers the stompers together in the red barn for a go-around where each team has to announce its name and its concept. Greek togas and crowns were consistently popular themes, since grape stomping is closely associated with mythology and the Greek god Bacchus, the God of Wine.

"What it is is you go up with dignity," said Franz Metger, one half of a husband-wife team from Winthrop that comprised The Token Male and Grape Stomp Goddesses, who won a case of Morgan Creek wine in the first heat.

Tradition didn't stop creativity at the Cambria Crush. The first heat saw a group from Milwaukee, dubbed the Packer Backers, compete among the eleven groups. The last heat was host to the Frankenwiners -- two Frankensteins and two Brides of Frankenstein who came to do the Monster Mash in their Savers costumes and grape tub -- the Fermentin' Friars from Aberdeen, S.D., and the DeVine Foxes, who came dressed as bottles of Morgan Creek's own Fox Run.

The stomping commenced and ceased at the sound of a starter pistol. Stompers went to work immediately, crushing as many grapes as possible within the two-minute timeframe with supporters, onlookers and teammates loudly cheering them on.

At the end of each each, teams wash their feet off in a laundry tub, grab the tub full of mashed grapes and haul it over to Ben Marti, who waits besides a old-fashioned apple press with a mesh filter to take all the seeds out. By the end of the competitions, his hands were a light, sticky purple.

"I don't know that these grapes would make good wine," he said. "They're more of a juice grape."

After the mess is poured out of the tub and into the press, the actual grape juice runs slowly out from underneath the press and trickles into an empty glass cider jug until the jug is full, at which point it's hustled over to the table where Georg Marti measures the amount of juice using some flasks, a notebook, a calculator and a giant markerboard hung on the side of the barn. Stompers pressed close to 41 gallons of grape juice during both heats on Saturday afternoon.

"This is my first year," said Al Peterson of Madelia, whose wife stomped grapes in one of the heats. "And I have every reason to be back next year. We in small towns don't always realize what we have around us."

Paula Marti estimated that close to 2,000 people came out to Morgan Creek for the Cambria Crush on Saturday afternoon, thereby exceeding last year's attendance by about 400 people.

"We are just really honored by the way people participated," she said.