The Medieval Year: Fifth Day before the Kalends of October

With a foreword from Chesterton on the properly paradoxical method of drinking wine.

The Medieval Year, a weekly feature of the Via Mediaevalis newsletter, gives us an opportunity to appreciate calendrical artwork from the Middle Ages, reflect on the basic tasks and rhythms of medieval life, and follow the medieval year as we make our way through the modern year. Please refer to the first post in this series for more background information!

If you’ve read the last few posts, you know that there’s been a lot of paradox at Via Mediaevalis lately. Since we’ll be talking about wine today, we might as well find something paradoxical to say about this quintessentially medieval beverage, and for that we will turn to Chesterton:

The sound rule [of drinking wine] would appear to be like many other sound rules—a paradox. Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable. Never drink when you are wretched without it, or you will be like the grey-faced gin-drinker in the slum; but drink when you would be happy without it, and you will be like the laughing peasant of Italy. Never drink because you need it, for this is rational drinking, and the way to death and hell. But drink because you do not need it, for this is irrational drinking, and the ancient health of the world.

Let’s begin this week with the always-impressive illustrations from the Hours of Henry VIII.

I don’t know how exactly the colors appear on your screen, but in my print reproduction of this image, the thematic color is a rich purplish-red that is darker than wine red but still wonderfully harmonious with the principal medieval labor of September.

As usual, Jean Poyet has produced a charming and masterful vision of ordinary life, with pleasantly contrasting hues, an engaging composition, and lovely details. But beyond that, the painting is a concise visual lesson in old-fashioned winemaking. The process begins in the upper left, where ladies are seated among the vines, picking the grapes. The men haul the grapes to the barn with the help of their handy basket backpacks. Apparently common in medieval France, where Poyet was working, these delightful inventions are virtually nonexistent in the United States, and I don’t recall seeing them in western Europe either. In eastern Europe, however, the basket-backpack tradition is alive and well:

It must be acknowledged, though, that their capacity is rather limited for serious work in the fields. Large loads require an alternative that is effective but less elegant:

Once the grapes are in the barn, they are poured into a winepress and trampled. Is it not utterly remarkable that human beings were once perfectly comfortable drinking a beverage that began its life as juice squeezed from unwashed fruit in a porous wooden vat by the bottom of a person’s foot? How did we go from that to the sterilized, pressured-washed, stainless-steel factories of the modern food-processing industry? Some might say that medieval folks knew nothing of microbes and therefore did not fear them. I might say that they knew a great deal of inherited wisdom about pre-scientific hygiene and felt no need to fear that which comes in a seemingly whole and healthful state from the natural world. In any case, we will see in a future post that, according to the most reliable evidence available to us, medieval communities were capable of robust health and remarkable freedom from disease.

After the grapes have been crushed, they are poured into a larger wooden vat with a spout for drawing off the new wine, which is then transferred to barrels for storing and aging. What eventually came out of those barrels must have been a vastly more variable product than the wine that we’re accustomed to, and some of it was no doubt on the less “sophisticated” side of the flavor spectrum.

Perhaps village-flavored wine was an acquired taste, but the peasants had been acquiring that taste for generations. And it’s strange to think that we no longer have the option of acquiring it. Consider everything that went into that wine: the soil, perhaps rather infertile yet without any trace of synthetic chemicals; the vines, locally adapted and not modified by scientific breeding programs; the air, completely free of industrial pollutants; the fermentation, influenced by unknown microbial species on the grapes, the wood, and the laborers’ skin—these conditions cannot now be replicated. They will never again be replicated. The modern world makes many things, but it cannot make medieval wine.

The miniatures in the Hours of Henry VIII are among the finest ever produced, and in previous weeks we looked at other works of high aesthetic merit. Lest The Medieval Year be accused of undue artistic “elitism,” let’s conclude this post with some calendrical art of a more homey and humble nature.

Northern France, early sixteenth century.

Flanders, fifteenth century.

Flanders, fifteenth century.

Northern France, late fifteenth century.

Why, you might be wondering, is there a naked man submerged in that wine vat?

I have no idea.

If there was such a thing as public health inspectors in the Middle Ages, this would have been an appropriate time for an inquiry.

Not all medieval illuminators were masters like Jean Poyet, but they nonetheless accomplished something marvelous, and which they surely did not expect: hundreds of years later, in an era of laparoscopic surgery and genetic engineering and supersonic flying machines, their works are housed in museums and treated like treasures, and modern folks like us are still pondering and enjoying them.