Goodbye Sturm season!! Until next year!
Yes, technically, you can get Sturm year-round now, but what fun is in that? That stuff is full of chemicals (I don’t know anything about wine production, for all I know it includes enough chemicals to heat the reactor in a nuclear power plant) AND the bottles close all the way, so are you even really drinking real Sturm if you don’t find yourself yelling at your spouse in the middle of Spar, that they’ve tipped the bottle too far and precious liquid gold is now all over the dairy aisle? But, your spouse will say, I just wanted to get a better look at the label and the nutritional facts. Pfffssshhhh… Sturm is Sturm.
Anyway, every province in Austria celebrates Sturm season a little differently. In Styria for example, in addition to drinking Sturm, they roast chestnuts in these scary looking oil vats!
First, you purchase the chestnuts at a local supermarket (because I still can never remember if you CAN or CAN’T eat the chestnuts that fall off the trees at the playgrounds) and then you find yourself a Styrian uncle who knows exactly how to roast them in aforementioned oil vat, and once the chestnuts are done you make a cone out of an old edition of the Krone or Kurier newspaper detailing yet another complicated and confusing footnote about the current corona lockdown, and voila!
Oh, and what I just found out, is when you toast with a glass of Sturm you NEVER say “Prost!”
No, no, no! Blasphemy!
What you say is, “Mahlzeit,” which basically means Bon Appetit! I guess because Sturm counts… as a meal? Which honestly, is how I’ve been tackling it all season, and my detox is going to be long and painful, I can feel it.
Anyway, stay safe during the current lockdown, and if you have any specific questions about the chestnuts, I will be more than happy to direct you to my uncle for further questions.