HOLY VINEYARD, WINEMAN!

Wegekreuz bei Blienschwiller, Germany. Photo from Rolf Kranz.

I once asked Christian Moueix, the scion of the family that owns Bordeaux’s Chateau Petrus, why he named his Napa Valley wine “Dominus,” Latin for “Lord God.”

“A religious name for one’s vineyard or wine is common in France,” he said. Indeed, his home property, Petrus, means “Peter,” but “Saint Peter.” On every bottle of Petrus, you see the first pope’s likeness; in his hands, he holds the papal keys.

The vineyards of Bordeaux, Burgundy, and the Rhone are chockablock with religious names; chateaux are named after the gospel (Evangile), more popes (Pape Clement; Châteauneuf du Pape), places of prayer (l’Oratoire; Eglise; Hermitage), even prayers themselves (Angélus; Gloria). Also, in Bordeaux, there is Mary Magdalene (Magdelaine).

Many, many chateaux and winemaking regions in France take their names from the word for “saint” or “holy”—St. Croix, St. Georges, St. Julien, St. Emilion, St. Joseph, and so on. A white wine from Burgundy, made of sauvignon blanc instead of the ubiquitous chardonnay, is called Saint-Bris, which I recommend to my Jewish friends for the ceremony attendant on the eighth day after a son’s birth.

There is Mary Magdalene (Magdelaine) in Bordeaux and the vineyard Beaune Grèves Vignes de l’Enfant Jésus, of which the Carmelite nuns who originally tended the vineyard are to have said, “This wine is so smooth that it slips down the throat like Baby Jesus in satin diapers.” I couldn’t make that up.

In their use of religious names for wine, Germans seem to favor priests and nuns (Forster Jesuitengarten, Erdener Prälat, Durkheimer Nonnengarten). In Germany, there are several vineyards named after cloisters—Something-Something Klosertgarten—one, after Heaven (Paradiesgarten), and one after the Jesuits (Jesuitengarten). Why are these all “gardens,” I am not sure.

The Italians are noted for their religious standoffishness. An Italian male goes to church three times in his life: his baptism, his wedding, and his funeral. Nonetheless, Italy sports many religious or holy references in its vineyard lands: Salvatore (Savior), Teodoro (Theodore, a name which translates from the Greek and Latin as “God’s gift), Benedetto (“blessed”) and the famed white and red wine vineyard of Campania, near Naples, called “Lacryma Christi” (“tears of Christ).

Lacryma Christi, the vineyard, takes its name from a story told by John Milton in “Paradise Lost" when Lucifer and the fallen angels were cast out of Heaven. According to the legend, as Lucifer went overboard, he grabbed a chunk of Paradise and carried it with him as he fell, dropping it at the bay of Naples. Seeing this loss in the divine kingdom, Christ wept, and where his tears fell, vines sprang up.

The ancient Greeks considered wine itself to be divine; the here and the there were one and the same. In the “Odyssey,” Ulysses, on the island of the Cyclops, finds, writes Homer, “spontaneous wines from weighty clusters pour, And Jove descends in each prolific shower.” 

Wine & Religion
And so wine flows, through Greek and Roman symposia, Jewish Passovers and other rituals, and Christian masses and ceremonies. 

Using or not using wine even became an identifying marker, in modern times, for religious communities such as those in the Amana colonies or the Latter-day Saints. 

In my view, we are able today to learn some significant secular lessons about the truth of wine from past religious experience with it.

I think especially about how Christian monks carved their names into the history of wine in Europe.

The most important example is the period of 700 unbroken years, from the Middle Ages until the French Revolution, when Benedictine and Cistercian monks labored in the vineyards of Burgundy, France, midwifing from one generation of monks to the next this incredibly fecund terroir. 

This was not mere work for them; it was prayer. “Orare et labore,” the monk’s motto, is variously translated as “Work and pray,” or “To work is to pray,” or “Work is prayer.” (The motto lives to this day in hundreds of monastic communities throughout the world.)

The monks of Burgundy, in a way we have difficulty understanding in our more secular age, lived in a world that did not separate the natural from the spiritual.

These monks were able, over their 700-year stewardship of their vineyard land, to isolate the hundreds of parcels that we call the vineyards of Burgundy, to rank this one over that one in quality, to delineate (literally, “draw a line around”; they used stone fences) the specialness of each vineyard.

They could do this because they were much closer to nature than we are, much more attuned to its wildness and untamed way. They could listen to the individual voice in which each parcel of Burgundy spoke and fine-tune that voice for the next generation of winemaker. 

This hypersensitivity to the ways of the earth defines Burgundy; it is the quintessence of the idea of “terroir.”

This ancient history is now come alive again. More and more modern winemakers find it to be their own best thinking about growing grapes and making wine.

But for the Burgundian monks, the nexus between God and grape was both their labor and their prayer, their here and their there, one and the same.

It is a rather inspirational way to think about wine, even today.