By early September, the Northern Hemisphere is well on its way toward autumn by the almanac, and the first big feast of the month is one that looks back toward summer and ahead toward fall. Not widely celebrated in the US, it is the Feast of the Nativity of Mary, celebrated each year on the 8th of September and mainly through two fruits: the summery blueberry and the autumnal grape.
In Italy, it is a day for blueberries, for their blueness serves as a reminder of the blue that is traditionally considered the color of Mary’s cloak. Across the Alps in France, it is a day for grapes. Farmers will harvest their finest grapes and bring them to church for blessings, and folks will place bunches of grapes in the hands of statues of Mary throughout the land. No wonder, for the feast is also known there as Our Lady of the Grape Harvest, being that it falls at the height of the grape harvest.
Just a few days ago, with the Convivio Book of Days calendar for September, I included in the blog a short home movie, circa 1950, of my dad and grandparents making wine. (To be honest, the movie clip is less about making wine than the fun that went along with it––it ends with my Grandma and the neighbor, Mamam, dancing with pizza pans.) Though my family is from Italy, I don’t know for sure if they did much with blueberries for the Feast of the Nativity of Mary. But considering it’s September, and considering each September Grandpa was busy at his winemaking… I suspect there were always grapes involved. For old times’ sake, here’s the home movie once again, and, as well, a link to the Convivio Book of Days calendar for September, should you have missed it. It’s a PDF, easily printed on standard letter size paper. Enjoy!
And here it is now, September. Just like that, we’ve entered the Ember Months, as I like to call them, for they all fall at the end of the year and they all have the same ending (–ember), save for October, of course, which has a variant of it, but still falls neatly into the Ember Months category. September, October, November, December: these are the months named for numbers: seven, eight, nine, ten… which described these months well before Julius Caesar added July and before Caesar Augustus added August to our calendar, both of them smack in the middle of things. And now they’re out of place a bit, these great months, the numbers that gave them their names out of sync with their calendrical places.
It was in September that my grandparents, both sets of them in their own respective places, even before my parents met, made their wine. My father would describe cleaning out the barrels each year with chains, which sounds like a heavy job and certainly it was. As were all the tasks of winemaking. Dad thought he would make a clean break from winemaking by marrying my mother and moving in with her family. But of course they made wine, too, each September, and so his work continued. There was the washing of the barrels and there was the trip to the market to buy all those grapes––crates of them, Zinfandel being Grandpa DeLuca’s grape of choice. And then the washing and crushing and barreling, the prelude to the magic of fermentation. The first tasting would not come until St. Martin’s Day in November, but what a great and exciting day that would be each autumn.
I never got to taste the wines that any of my grandparents made. By the time I was born, they were all buying their wine in bottles. But there is one connexion to our vintner past still in the family home: a ceramic vessel from Lucera, our ancestral homeland in Puglia, that belonged to my great-grandfather, Raffaele DeLuca. Grandpa’s sister Adelina brought it from Italy and gave it to my grandfather, and there it is in the photo above. Perhaps someone else gave it to Raffaele, for on the wooden stopper are carved and inked the letters T’C, and there are no T’Cs in our ancestral lineage that I have found. Perhaps the letters refer to the potter who made the vessel. Perhaps we’ll never know. It is the oldest thing we have from our past, this vessel that we’re not even sure what to call. It seems particular to the region of Puglia, from which my grandparents hail. My mom and aunt both remember Grandpa calling it a biretta or a fiasca. Fiasca translates neatly to “flask,” but biretta is not an easy word to translate and probably was part of Grandpa’s Lucerine dialect. Oddly enough, biretta is also the name of the hat that is commonly worn by many clergy in the church, from priests to bishops and cardinals. You know it. It’s the square hat, black for priests, red for cardinals, with the four peaks or horns. If you look squarely down on the top of Raffaele DeLuca’s wine vessel, it, too, is shaped just like one of these hats. So maybe that’s where the name comes from. No one knows.
But anyway, all of this is to say that Grandpa’s biretta reminds me always of wine and winemaking, and September reminds me of these things, too… and so perhaps it is only natural that that biretta is the cover star for your Convivio Book of Days calendar for September. The calendar is our monthly gift to you: a printable PDF on standard letter size paper that you can pin to your bulletin board. It’s a nice companion to the blog and with any luck, I’ll be writing about each of the days mentioned in the calendar. And if I don’t, know that I’d like to. It’s a busy time of year––and I’m not even making wine.
Have a wonderful September.
John
You can find a handsome photograph of Raffaele & Maria DeLuca, my great-grandparents, at our About page. And finally, to send you off, here’s a home movie of winemaking at my grandparents’ home in Brooklyn in the late 1940s or early 1950s. Mom is probably filming the event. Dad is hammering a barrel at the start; Grandpa is holding a barrel hoop and turning it around. The neighbor, Mamam, initiates the Dance of the Pizza Pans with Grandma, who always seems to be saying, “Turn off the camera!” I love all these people. They are the reason behind the Convivio Book of Days.
Today’s Convivio Book of Days chapter begins with an apology, for giving you some inaccurate information in the previous chapter (The Printer’s Devil’s Wayzgoose)… which is a bit ironic, considering that I touched on the topic of “fake news” and rumor and misinformation. In that chapter, I told you that St. Bartholomew, whose feast day on the 24th of August is the source of the traditional printers’ Wayzgoose celebration, is a patron saint of printers, papermakers, and bookbinders. That’s not quite right, and I apologize for misleading you. He is a patron saint of bookbinders, but not of the other two branches of the Book Arts trades. He is, however, so wrapped up in all things related to the Book Arts, that I will beg your understanding for my error.
Today, however, we do have a feast day of a patron saint of printers. It is the Feast of St. Augustine of Hippo, patron saint not just of printers, but also of brewers. As a letterpress printer who has dabbled in brewing, this is a holiday I can really get behind. My plan for the day, since I have wrangled a day off from work, is to fire up the Vandercook No. 4 and print at least one run of the type forme I composed and set in the bed of the press last January. And, obviously, Seth and I will have to pop the cork on some special brew or other. We have just one bottle left of our Convivio Stout, and maybe this is the night to empty it.
As for St. Augustine himself, he was born in Northern Africa, in what is now Tunisia, in 354, the son of St. Monica. He became a patron saint of printers thanks to his prolific writing. Books like his Confessions probably kept a lot of early printers in business. The confessions were easy to come by for Augustine: he was a fellow who liked a good time, at least early on in life, and this is the root of his patronage for brewers. His mother prayed for his conversion. Eventually he did convert and he began to write. He was long considered a Doctor of the Church and was canonized at the turn of the 14th century, about 150 years before Johannes Gutenberg perfected the idea of moveable type and ushered in the information and literacy revolution that came with the proliferation of printing. It is said that on a wall of his room St. Augustine had written these words, in large letters: “Here we do not speak evil of anyone.” Words of wisdom, worthy of writing on our walls or printing on our presses or sending to our elected officials, and words to live by in this week of celebrations print and book related––this week of Wayzgooses and related celebrations of papermaking, printing, bookbinding, brewing. All crafts of the human hand and heart, all, in their way and in proper doses, portals bridging earth and heaven, assisting us mere mortals to attain that graceful state of happiness in flow. I’ll take that.
Image: Our own Convivio Stout. Alas, but one bottle left. It’s the Convivio Stout Seth Thompson and I brewed some time ago, getting no better with age, I’m sure, but still, we’ve always hesitated to open the very last bottle. Perhaps this St. Augustine’s Night is the time to do it. The good news is I printed plenty of labels. They are letterpress printed by hand in three print runs: a subtle background of wood type printed in transparent white on white, plus the orange and black runs. Back to the brewing, then!
Thanks to all who came to the Library Wayzgoose Festival on Saturday. It was a blast! And don’t forget: today is primary election day here in Florida. Get to the polls! You have until 7 PM here in Palm Beach County.
