**Disclaimer!! I'm not a great photographer



This one's better

I swear this had no alcohol

Nostalgia

Many of you may know that I am not a soda drinker. I really don't love carbonation. I also don't drink a lot of juice. I like to drink water and soymilk (not together), and the occasional diet coke (usually only medicinally when I have a headache). So in a very rare moment at Whole Foods I decided to grab a bottle of Fizzy Lizzy carbonated juice. It wasn't just that I was hankering for grape soda--it was Yakima Valley Grape Juice. Like Proust's famed madeleine cookies, I was brought back to memories of my childhood.

All growing up my mom canned her own grape juice from fruit picked in the Yakima Valley. When my siblings and I were old enough mom and her friend Elaine dragged all the kids to the vinyards to go grape picking. I will be totally honest, this really wasn't a fun activity. After all it was work. Hard work with sticky grape clusters that were hard to pull off the vine, dust and dirt, and worst of all--bugs. Somehow the bees and yellow jackets loved to chase little girls covered in grape goo. At least how that seemed to me.

I am sure us kids complained a lot, and I am even more sure that we were told more than once that if we wanted grape juice we had to help out. Of course Warren, Byron and I got a bit of revenge and played with some cattails. While we played the cattails exploded and their cottony innards flew around and eventually got stuck on our grape covered bodies. I wish I had a photo of that.

How was the Fizzy Lizzy carbonated fruit juice? It was good, but not as good as mom's (or Elaine's) grape juice that we worked so hard to make.