Twelve Grapes for Good Luck in the New Year

I had observed last year that the price of fresh grapes, always high in my area of Spain, seemed even higher the last week of the year. Especially seedless grapes. But the price of fresh grapes was nothing in comparison to the price of the small cans of seedless, peeled grapes that appear in mountainous displays in the grocery stores in the days leading up to New Year's Eve (Noche Vieja).

The Spanish custom of eating twelve grapes at midnight on December 31st began almost a hundred years ago. By most accounts, 1909 unexpectedly produced a bumper crop of grapes in Alicante, so the grape growers came up with the superstition that if you swallow a grape at each stroke of the clock as the old year passes into the new, you will have good luck for each of the twelve months in the new year.

I bought my supply of green, seedless grapes several days ago, because I saw them for 1,50€ for a half kilo and I thought that was a bargain. Sure enough, later in the week I saw them elsewhere for 1,75€ or even 2,25€. My first New Year in Spain I had bought a package of three small cans--three individual servings--for €3 or 5€, thinking there must be something special about them. Individual servings of 12 grapes are also now packaged, conveniently enough, in tall fluted plastic glasses that can be filled with cava, the very acceptable Spanish answer to champagne, immediately after the grapes are gone. At Eroski, a local hypermarket, the individual cava glasses with grapes were selling for 1€ each two days ago. New Year's Eve afternoon, when I stopped by at 5:30 to pick up a fresh baguette, they were already marked down to 30 euro cents apiece.

The standard timekeeper for the turn of the year in Spain is the tower clock on the Correos (post office) building in the Puerta del Sol plaza in Madrid. I'm not sure whether the twelve strokes of midnight actually toll at the rate of one every second, but I am sure that they are not spaced long enough apart for me to down twelve grapes in a row and be finished by the start of the new year--I haven't made it yet. I have learned that seedless grapes are required, and next year I am going to further prepare them by peeling the skin away.

Even though I didn't make it through my twelve grapes by the end of 2008, my glass did get filled with cava, which tastes remarkably good with green grapes. That's an auspicious start to a new year, and marking the end of the old one by listening to the clock strike twelve certainly seems more appropriate that watching a ball drop.

Happy New Year! ¡Buen año nuevo!