From St Vincent and St Bartholomew, to the “Pruner” St Trifon Zarezan, Stuart Walton celebrates the many patron saints of vinegrowers.
Modern enological lore has established the indissoluble connection between viticulture and vinification. Grape-growing and winemaking are no longer two distinct disciplines, a conception that belongs more to the ambit of contract growers and négociants. Artisanal wines begin with the vigneron tasting grapes in the vineyard, overseeing training regimes and canopy management, and making crucial decisions about when to harvest each plot, each row, each berry.
In Christian tradition too, these continuities obtain. Tending vineyards and turning grapes into wine are anything but separate enterprises, each with its own tutelary protector. The chief patron saint of winemakers is St Vincent of Saragossa, whose day falls in January, but grape-growers might look to a number of other heavenly representatives, depending on where they are, and at what stage of the annual cycle.
First among the patron saints of vinegrowers is St Bartholomew, one of the original twelve disciples of Jesus. For his reputedly ghastly martyrdom—in the most widely cited version, he was flayed alive prior to being beheaded—he is the presiding saint of furriers, butchers, and other professions where cutting and skinning are involved. But his saint’s day falls on 24 August, the late summer moment when crops are coming to full ripeness and the moment has arrived to ascertain whether the harvest looks to be a successful one or not.
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A long European tradition has it that the weather conditions on St Bartholomew’s Day will determine the health or otherwise of this year’s vendange. Woe betide the vines if it’s tippling down. The thought lies halfway between respectful piety and agricultural common sense. Rain on the skins at this crucial moment of the ripening will dilute the quality of the must. By the same token, if things looked good, grape-growers would conventionally ask the saint to pray for them just before the grapes were pressed, to ratify the potential of a good healthy crop. In the Apostolic Church in Armenia, whose patron he is, the first grape harvest of each year is given a ritual ecclesial blessing.
Had it not been for the graphically horrible death, we might have grown accustomed to seeing Bartholomew among clusters of purple grapes, like a Christian Bacchus, but classical art nearly always shows him, as on the Sistine ceiling where he has borrowed Michelangelo’s own face, holding his flayed skin in his hand like a discarded body-stocking. In other pictures, he has slung it, a sacred raincoat, over his arm. But hardly ever the grapes.
Protection from the patron saints of vinegrowers
The more marginal the viticultural climate, the more a grower had need of saintly protection and even intervention. St Cyriacus was especially revered by vineyard owners in regions of Germany, notably the Palatinate or Rheinpfalz. His saint’s day is on August 8th, when veraison is barely under way, but he was already invoked earlier in the year against spring frosts, and his vigilance against bad weather will be required once again when the harvest—and late harvests—are due. He is honoured in the name of the Franken single vineyard Cyriakusberg, where the Scheurebe grape is noted for making wines of electrifying mineral purity.
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St Urban of Langres looks after the vinegrowers of Dijon and northern Burgundy. St Morand of Cluny extends his sway over Burgundy, Champagne, and Alsace, as well as most of the Rhine Valley. In his lifetime in the early12th century, he was said to have made it through one whole season of Lent on a single bunch of grapes. St Trifon Zarezan, known as the Pruner because he was induced to cut off his own nose with a pair of gardening shears for insulting an apparition of the Blessed Virgin, is the patron saint of Bulgaria’s grape-growers. The saints’ days of all of these fall earlier in the year than August. Trifon has to share a day with St Valentine, who tends to get a lot more press.
The relics of St Bartholomew are dispersed across a number of sites. His remains are said to have been dumped in a metal chest and thrown into the sea off Anastasiopolis in ancient Turkey. Miraculously, the chest floated westward on the waves, drifting all the way to Lipari. The Italian relics are housed partly in the Basilica of San Bartolomeo all’Isola in Rome, and partly in another church dedicated to him in the Campanian capital of Benevento. His skull lies in his patronal cathedral in Frankfurt. Queen Emma, wife of King Cnut, bought an arm off the Bishop of Benevento in the eleventh century, throwing in a gorgeous liturgical cope in part-exchange, and then gifted the limb to Christ Church Priory, now Canterbury Cathedral. It went missing, probably destroyed, during the Reformation.
These days, it may be as well to ask the saint to intercede for protection not from inclement weather in the ripening season, but from the calamitous wildfires that have engulfed parts of the Gironde, Spain, California, and the Okanagan Valley. Maybe just say prayers, rather than lighting candles.
