22nd of January is in Croatia the date when the beginning of the new grape-growing and wine-making season is celebrated. It’s the day of St. Vincent’s feast day, and St. Vincent (San Vicente de Zaragoza) is one of the most beloved saints in Croatian inland regions, also known as the protector-saint of Portugal, Lisbon, Valencia, vintners, wine-makers, wine traders and tailors. In Croatian he’s called Sveti Vinko, and his day has various names: Vicekovo, Vinkovo, Vincelovo, Vincekuša (used in different regions). On the day, various festivities take place, mostly in the vineyard, as it is considered that on or around this day the new vegetative cycle of the vine is about to begin. Apparently, that’s probably not so this year, as most vineyards in continental Croatia are still covered with quite a lot of snow, and temperatures are well below freezing even on the warmest time of the day, but, hey, you gotta obey the tradition unless you want to be blamed for a bad wine year, and you don’t want that, do you?
The ceremony is quite fixed, and does not vary much among the regions in Croatia: the vineyard owner, along with his entourage, has to go to his vineyard, no matter how deep the snow or the mud around the vines; he would cut several branches (usually it would be three branches) with three buds on them to take them home. While still in the vineyard, they bless the vineyard with some of the last year’s wine and some consecrated water (and, yes, sometimes there’ll be an actual priest present for the festivities in the vineyard), and then the weirdest part of the customs comes to play: they hang certain types of charcutterie (either air-dried sausages or in Slavonia more often a kulen, similarly tasting but larger in size product made from ground meat and paprika) on one of the vines, in order to help the vines produce large grapes when time comes. The idea with kulen is that they ask St. Vincent to make their grapes as large as the kulen on that year. And sometimes there’s presidents in the vineyard for the festivities as well.
After the official part of the festivities, everyone goes back to their cellars and yes, we’re sorry to report that a lot of drinking goes on there that night. There’s often music involved, you’re not supposed to be in your cellar alone (and you need to show that you’re a generous host by offering a lot of food and wine to your guests) and the folk wisdom says that the more the vineyard owner manages to drink that night, the better his harvest is going to be, come autumn. And those three branches that were cut in the vineyard? They’re placed in water in the house, put next to a window in order to observe their budding, and make predictions on the quality of harvest that year.
The custom, as we said, exists mostly in continental Croatian vineyards, in regions of Međimurje, Plešivica, Moslavina, Slavonia, Baranja etc. It is very rarely celebrated in Dalmatia and Istria, some say because the annual growth cycle of wines has already started there and maybe just because it is a custom mostly revered in Alsace, southern Germany and Austria…
