Kamari Koonce
This past weekend we visited an apple winery for their annual Yesan Wine Festival. The day started off by traveling from Hanyang to Yesan for about 2 hours and 30 minutes. It was also worth the price to go and was coordinated by the International office. The event is mostly for exchange students and is one of the many events they hold during the semester. So, if you get a chance you should add this to your bucket list.
Once we were there we had lunch with the entire group and tried the different varieties of wine available. We were even given a short briefing of the winery’s history of making apple wine. According to the owner of the winery, South Korea doesn’t naturally grow the grapes needed to make traditional wine. This was very surprising to me and I thought it was amazing that the owner was passionate enough to go to Canada to learn how to make ice wine. Instead of making the apple wine with grapes, they use apples and blueberries.
After lunch we were then taken into a room to make apple pie. I was kind of disappointed with the taste of the pie though. The pie was very dry and the apple pieces were chewier than I imagined it to be based on the apple pie I’ve tasted in America. The crust of the apple pie was really good and it looked pretty, but I probably won’t eat it again here. In addition to making apple pie, we cooked apple jam that we jarred and took home. I definitely liked it more than the apple pie.
The next thing we did was learn about the apple wine process. The owner took us to the operation level in the basement. We watched a short video and he spoke to us about how long the winery existed. He even let us try brandy which is about 50% alcohol level, so slightly less than average. I kind of liked it even though it was really strong. After we tried the brandy we each got to bottle our own bottle of the apple wine.
Finally, we got the chance to pick apples. The apples they have at the winery were Fuji apples. If you’re into apples you know that not all apples taste the same. Fuji apples are probably one of my favorite because they’re really sweet but have a slight sour taste to them. While we were in the fields we saw, an actual dead bird used as a “scarecrow” and a pet dog which barked at us.
Yesan wine festival was a fun and peaceful event overall. I hope that you will enjoy as well if you decide to go. You can go individually or with a group of people that you know. Next year the office should have another trip planned and should be open around the same time in November (1st– 9th). However, they start sending out notifications about the event around the first week of October if you are interested.
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