Grape Juice, Old Vines and Two Very Expensive Lawnmowers Called the Ladies

We arrived in the last golden breath of August, and the vines were waiting for us.

I don’t know quite how else to put it. We’d been driving for what felt like several lifetimes, north from the sunburnt hills of Andalusia, through the wide, flat gold of the middle of Spain, and finally up into Galicia, where the world turns green so suddenly it feels like someone has changed the channel. Somewhere along the way, the dry brown scrub gave way to chestnut trees and stone walls and mist pooling in the valleys like spilled milk. The air through the open window changed too. It smelled of damp earth and woodsmoke and something cool and green I didn’t have a name for yet.

Our trusty seven-seater Chrysler Grand Voyager was packed to the roof with our entire life in cardboard, plus two dogs and one very opinionated chicken. The girls were sticky with road snacks, the littlest finally asleep, the other two arguing in that low, exhausted way children argue when they’ve run out of everything else to do. And I was carrying that strange, hollow ache you get when you’ve just closed the door on one life and haven’t yet found the handle of the next.

Then we turned onto our road, rounded the last bend, and there they were.

Before you see the house, before you see anything at all really, you see the vines. They stand right at the front of the land, next to the house, the very first thing to greet you as you drive up. Old ones. Gnarled and knuckled like a grandmother’s hands, leaning on their wires as if they’d been waiting by the gate for us all afternoon. And they were heavy, so heavy, with fruit. Dusky purple clusters hanging low beneath the leaves, warm from the late sun and humming with wasps, practically spilling over onto the road.

I pulled up, turned off the engine, and just sat there for a moment with my hands on the wheel. The girls had gone quiet. Even the wasps seemed to pause.

And I thought: oh. Hello. I know you.

We’ve done this before (sort of)

If you’re new here: before Galicia, we had a little smallholding in the hills outside Málaga. Fruit trees, a handful of vines, chickens who ruled the place like tiny feathered dictators, and for a while, pigs who stole my heart and regularly destroyed my fences. It was small, sun-baked and gloriously chaotic, and it taught us almost everything we know.

So this time, I wasn’t looking at those vines with the wide-eyed terror of a beginner. It was more like bumping into an old friend in a new city. The south taught me grapes in the dry, blazing heat. Galicia, it seems, intends to teach me grapes in the soft green damp. Same old friend, very different coat.

What I didn’t know, sitting in that car at the gate, was that before I’d so much as unpacked a fork, I’d be buying two sheep off the internet in a mild panic.

But let’s start with the grapes.

A harvest among the boxes

There’s something faintly ridiculous about harvesting grapes when you can’t find a single saucepan. The kitchen was a fortress of cardboard. I genuinely did not know which box held the plates. But grapes don’t care about any of that. They ripen when they ripen, and then the wasps and the birds and the rain move in, and if you haven’t picked them by then, that’s that.

So that first week, we abandoned the boxes and went out into the vines.

The mist was just lifting off the valley, and the grass was soaking. The girls were in pajama bottoms and rain boots because nobody could find anything resembling actual pants, and the littlest was strapped to my chest, chewing thoughtfully on my collar. We had a couple of buckets, a laundry basket, and the pruning shears I’d shoved in my coat pocket back in Málaga, as though some part of me had known.

The eldest remembered our old harvests and slipped straight back into it, snipping each bunch with the solemn care of a tiny surgeon. The middle one ate roughly one grape for every three she picked and ended up purple to the elbows and completely unrepentant. The littlest supervised. Every so often a car would slow down on the road, and a neighbor would lean out to wave at the strange new foreigners picking grapes in their pajamas. We waved back, sticky-handed.

We filled everything we had. Then we filled my sweater, tied into a makeshift sling, which I fully expect to be finding grape stains on for the rest of my life.

And then we stood in the kitchen, sticky and grinning, surrounded by boxes and buckets of fruit, and I thought: right. Now what?

Enter the steam juicer

Of all the things I could have packed somewhere sensible, I’m still not sure why it was the steam juicer. Not the bedding. Not the children’s shoes. But there it was, in a box scrawled “KITCHEN – SORT LATER,” gleaming at me as though it had been waiting for this exact moment.

If you’ve never met one, let me introduce you, because it’s one of the most quietly brilliant tools I own. A steam juicer is a tall stack of three pans. The bottom holds water. The middle catches the juice. The top is a basket full of holes, where the fruit sits. As the water boils, steam rises through the fruit and gently coaxes out the juice, which drips down into the middle pan and flows out through a little tube with a clamp. No pressing. No cheesecloth bags hung from the backs of chairs. Just steam, patience, and a kitchen that smells like heaven.

How we made our grape juice

Every steam juicer is a little different, so do check your own instructions, but here’s roughly how it went for us.

• Rinse the grapes in a big bowl of cold water and pick out leaves, squashed or moldy fruit and the odd surprised bug. I left most of ours on the stems. Some people pull every grape off first, since stems can add a little bitterness, but with three kids and no idea where the cutting boards were, I chose survival over perfection.
• Fill the bottom pan with water, set the juice pan on top, and pile the grapes high in the basket. You can sprinkle a little sugar over them if you like it sweeter. Ours were so ripe they didn’t need any.
• Lid on, heat up, and wait. It usually takes an hour or so, sometimes longer with a big load. Keep an eye on the water level so the bottom pan never boils dry.
• Draw off the juice through the tube into hot, sterilized bottles. This is the moment I will never tire of: the juice pours out a deep, glowing, jewel-bright purple, steaming hot and smelling of late summer and old stone walls.
• Store it sensibly. Juice you’ll drink within a few days can simply be cooled and kept in the fridge. For longer storage on the shelf, follow tested home-canning guidance for juice, which usually means hot sterilized bottles processed in a water bath.

One gentle word of caution: everything about a steam juicer is hot. The juice, the tube, the steam, the lid. It’s a grown-up job, with little ones kept well back. Mine were stationed at the kitchen table on official bottle-counting duty, which they took extremely seriously.

The verdict

They loved it. Not in the polite way children “love” a vegetable you’ve hidden in pasta sauce, but in the full-hearted, can I have more way that makes the steam and the sticky floors entirely worth it.

We drank it warm the first night, in mismatched mugs, perched on boxes because the chairs were still wrapped in plastic. We drank it cold at breakfast. We watered it down for the littlest, who accepted it with the expression of someone being let in on a very good secret.

Bottle after bottle lined the windowsill, catching the light like stained glass. In a house where nothing was unpacked and nothing was where it should be, those bottles felt like the first real proof that we lived here.

Now, about the ladies

I need to back up a little, because you can’t understand the jelly tragedy without understanding the ladies. And you can’t understand the ladies without understanding the paperwork.

One of the first things I did after we arrived, before the boxes, before the grapes really, was drive to our local agricultural office. I wanted to make sure our farm license was active and find out what paperwork I needed to sort out. Very responsible. Very grown-up. I was quite proud of myself.

It turns out there’s a rule: if a farm goes a full year with no registered animals, its license expires. And the previous owner, it turns out, hadn’t had any registered animals for three hundred and sixty-three days.

I found this out on a Friday morning.

The license was due to expire on Sunday.

The vet at the office looked at me across the desk, kindly but very clearly, and explained my options. Either I found some animals, fast, or the license would lapse and we’d have to start the whole process over from scratch. And anyone who has dealt with farm paperwork in Spain will understand that “start over from scratch” is not a phrase you want to hear.

So I did what any calm, rational, experienced homesteader would do. I sat in the car in the parking lot and frantically scrolled through Mil Anuncios, Spain’s answer to Craigslist, looking for livestock. Any livestock. Something close, something available, something I could buy, collect and register before the afternoon was out.

And there they were. Two sheep. Not far away. Available today.

Four hours later, they were mine. (The whole ridiculous saga is here: the day we bought two sheep in four hours.)

I’m not proud of my due diligence. I didn’t ask many questions. I didn’t check teeth or pedigrees or temperaments. I just needed two living, breathing, registrable animals on our land before the weekend. It was only afterward, once the dust had settled and the license was safe, that I discovered they’re twelve and fourteen years old.

In sheep years, that’s… well. Let’s just say they’ve seen some things.

And that’s how they became the ladies. Because two elderly sheep with that much dignity and that many years behind them simply can’t be called anything else. They carry themselves like two retired aunties who’ve wandered into the wrong garden party and decided to stay anyway.

The jelly that never was

So. The jelly.

After that first round of juice, I had big plans for the rest of the grapes, the bunches still ripening further along the rows. I was going to turn them into jars of glossy purple jelly. Something to spread on toast through the winter. Something to give the neighbors as an edible hello. I had visions of neat rows on the pantry shelf, each with its own handwritten label.

What I hadn’t planned for was the ladies discovering the vineyard.

One damp morning, I went out with my basket, humming, full of jelly-related optimism, and found the vines stripped almost bare. Leaves nibbled. Grapes vanished. And there in the middle of it all, in full view of anyone driving past, stood my two emergency sheep, chewing slowly and looking completely innocent. One had a vine leaf stuck to her ear like a jaunty little hat.

They looked at me. I looked at them. Nobody apologized.

And then I laughed, because what else can you do? Those two old girls had saved our farm license, after all. If anyone had earned a few grapes, it was them.

What the vines (and the ladies) taught me

I’m not angry. Well, not very angry.

Because the thing about homesteading, whether on a small dusty hillside in the south or a sprawling green farm in the north, is that you never really get to be in charge. You get to take part. You plan your jelly, and the sheep eat it. You go in for a simple bit of paperwork, and you come home with two geriatric ewes. You try, and you adapt, and you laugh, and you try again.

We didn’t get our jelly this year. But we got a misty morning in the vines with the girls, purple to the elbows. We got a windowsill full of jewel-colored bottles in a house full of boxes. We got that first warm mug, sipped on cardboard, when this strange new place first started to feel like it might become home.

And we got the ladies, who I suspect will outlive us all out of sheer stubbornness.

Next year, I’m fixing that fence.

With love (and a very stern word for the ladies),

Milly x

P.S. Have you ever made a slightly unhinged farm decision under pressure? Please tell me in the comments. I need to know I’m not alone. And if you have a favorite grape jelly recipe, send it my way. I’m already plotting next year’s revenge.