Raki making (diaries part 13)

By the end of November the weather cleared and became warm and sunny once again. This was the signal for the olive harvest to begin.

Walking along the road I could hear the workers in the fields and I could smell the aroma of the wild sage and mint that grew along the edges of the road, mingling with that of the ripening oranges and lemons in the fields. It always seems strange how the orange trees had fruit and blossom on at the same time.

I was glad I had enough money saved from the summer so I didn’t need to go and pick olives. I knew it was very hard work, and I was enjoying my free time. This was in the days before many people had machines to help with the harvest and the olive trees were harvested by hitting them with broom handles, long bamboo canes and some of the women would gather the fruit from the lower branches by hand. I had spent a week during a winter holiday helping out and it was a very tiring and dirty job.

One evening I bumped into Kostas at ‘We and Us’, the local kafenion and we shared a friendly drink with a group of villagers. The evenings being cooler now, Christos, the landlord, had put a wood burning stove in the middle of the room; it had pipes that went out through a hole in the window. It was blazing so strongly the metal of the stove was glowing red. Often he baked potatoes in the ashes and cooked fish or pork on a piece of tin foil on the top of the stove.

“We are going to the still,” Kostas announced “Do you want to come with us?”

I was puzzled, what was he talking about?

“The still for making the tsigouthia” he explained. "You know it is made by distilling the grape skins that have been fermenting since wine making?"

I had never seen tsigouthia (raki) being made. I was curious to see how it was done, so I agreed. We set off in a convoy of rattling cars and trucks, most of which had seen better days, gears grating and engines grinding.

We wound up a narrow, muddy lane, in the tiny hamlet of Katouna, which consisted of only a few houses, one of which belonged to George, from Kalivaki beach, where he kept a flock of peacocks

“Now I understand what the strange noise is I have been hearing,” I told Kostas “I couldn’t for the life of me think what it was.”

“You mean the peacocks? Yes, they do make a lot of noise, the sound echoes around for kilometres.”

Set a little back from the houses I spied a large shed, this seemed to be where we were heading. Inside were three big metal cauldrons with pipes leading from them and large fires crackling away underneath each one. Men were sitting and standing around, watching as a clear liquid dripped into plastic barrels.

The spirit is made by distilling the grape skins and residue from wine making.

Meat and sausages were being cooked on the fire under the still

  “Put these on the fire,” Kostas said, handing a foil wrapped package to Antonis, who had the licence and was in charge of the still. When he opened it I could see it contained pork chops and sausages. There seemed that there was more to this ‘raki business’ than met the eye. It was obviously a social occasion too.

“Have a glass of wine,” offered Adonis, handing me a paper cup. He was a tall well built man, with a bushy ginger beard. I had met him several times in the cafenion and knew him to be  a farmer with a large flock of sheep.

“During the next couple of weeks Adonis will not have time to go to bed at all,” explained Kostas. “He has to keep the still alight all the time. He will grab a few hours sleep on the hay over there from time to time,” he nodded at a tumble of hay in the corner of the barn, “while somebody else watches the fire.”

Just at that moment, a clear spirit started dripping from the pipe which led out of one of the cauldrons. Men rushed with their paper cups to test the still warm tsigoudia.

“Here try some.” Kostas handed me a cup with a thimbleful of warm spirit in the bottom. I sipped cautiously.

Time to test the results!

“I’ve never tasted lighter fluid but I suspect it may taste something like this,” I grimaced.

“It will mellow in a few weeks,” said Kostas draining his cup to the last drop.

I realized that herbs were being put on some of the fires, would it impart a different flavour? I wondered. Before I could ask, Irini, Adonis’ wife, arrived with a large bag of chicken pieces which she gave to Adonis to barbecue.

Irini was short and dark with bad scarring on her neck and chest. I heard, sometime later, that this was from a burn. She had been treated by using fresh honey as an antiseptic. The general opinion was that the scarring would have been much worse had they not treated it this way.

“We always have a good time socializing around the fire,” Kostas told me. “Everyone comes here, rather than to the cafenions, during these two weeks.” As if to prove the veracity of this statement, at that moment Christos arrived.

“I’ve closed up for the night,” he said. “No point in sitting there on my own.” Kostas by this time seemed to be settled in for the night and, after a while, I realized that it was getting rather late.

“I will probably leave soon,” I told him.

“It’s early yet, stay till later,” he tried to persuade me.

“I will stay a little longer,” I agreed, “but if anybody decides to go down the mountain I will probably ask for a lift.”

He looked up at me and smiled. “I would take you myself, but I think that by the time I leave I will be drunk!”

“That is obvious.” I laughed.

 He looked over and called to a man sitting near the fire. I recognized him as one of the local fishermen. “Hey, Nektarios! When you go down to Georgioupolis can you take Helen down with you?”

“Of course” was the reply. “I’ll be leaving in about ten minutes.” Ten minutes in Crete is not the same thing as ten minutes anywhere else and it was some time before I eventually left the gathering leaving them all sitting around the still telling stories of old times and putting the world to rights.