Water to Wine

There's been a brief feature story floating around the web the past few days that's just too funny not to share. In the town of Marino, south of Rome in the Castelli Romani wine region, residents throw a huge celebration each year for the annual wine harvest. The culmination of this event, the bang they sort-of go out on each year, is a fireworks display packed with liters and liters of the years effervescent white wine being pumped through a fountain called The Fountain of the Four Moors.

Every year, town engineers work out a bit of magic with the plumbing to push the wine through appropriate pipes and out of the fountain for consumption - but this year they saw a snag in the plans. As the fireworks went off and the vino was supposed to flow, none came.

After looking into the matter for about ten minutes, they finally realized that the wine was actually being pumped into homes surrounding the fountain. This was realized after people ended up bathing, drinking and attempting to cook pasta with the fresh white wine. Of course, the problem was remedied soon, but the best part of the story is that many of the lucky folks who were getting wine pumped in scrambled for pots and pans, storing up as much free wine as they could. Only in wine country . . . hilarious.