2007 was a landmark year for County winegrowers. That was the year a 40 per cent increase in yield and the expansion in numbers of wineries brought us DVA status, and PEC joined the world-wide network of official wine regions.

It was also the year we invented Wassail.

We needed the visitors to come in the darkest, most depressing time of the year, November, and maybe December for good measure.

That is when I came up with the idea. We should boldly celebrate our distinctive agricultural reality, stark and cold as it was, and base the closing event of the season on burying the vines. We would not be the first to celebrate shutting down a farm late in the season. That was a thing since the Middle Ages, in the apple orchards of England. Why not adapt that tradition, make it something distinctively our own?

(Right) The late Ed Neuser of Waupoos Winery was a proponent of Wassail. (Gazette file photo)

We did our research. The term “wassail” seemed to have derived from a Danish greeting, roughly translated as “to your health,” that first became common in the 8^th or 9^th century, after the Nordic invasions of Britain.

In England, the orchard workers would load up with cider and other grog, and then troop from estate to estate, begging for food and more hooch from the orchard owners. They would choose a King and Queen of the Wassail and hoist them up into the trees in each vineyard, fill a hollowed-out loaf of bread with cider (maybe linked to past druid practices) and toast the past harvest and the harvests yet to come. And they would sing and cavort about as they went.

In fact, wassailing led to caroling, big in the 19^th century.

It was a ready-made festival. Our customers would play the part of the orchard workers and come around to each of our tasting rooms. We would encourage them to sing (and maybe even cavort) by offering a free taste to anyone who sang even a line of a wintry song, along with comfort food and mulled wines.

Each winery could put their own imprint on the event, and bring wine buyers to their grounds in late November, when the County was empty. We would hold Wassail on weekends, just before the heavy rural darkness fell.

The Wine Association selected a King and Queen of the Wassail each year, who received festive crowns made by an artist. They got to keep their crowns — but the loving cup was to be passed on to the next wassail royalty. Every year, we toasted the harvest just passed and the successful burying of the vines, the guarantee of a harvest to come.

I adapted the traditional wassailing song and had print outs for people to sing when they arrived.

Here we come a-wassailing among our vines so fine

                           Here we come a-wassailing to toast with our good wine.

We didn’t know what to expect. I remember being shocked on one of the first Saturdays to see a small bus pull up at our place with fifteen people or so, who followed a guitar-playing pied piper singing lustily as they traipsed into the tasting room.

It was a huge success. We were right in thinking November was one of the most depressing months, dark, cold, a presage of a long winter to come. This applied as much to County folk as it did those from away. Everyone needed an excuse to celebrate, beginning with the exhausted vineyard workers who had tied down the canes in the cold and fearfully ploughed dirt over the vines before the ground froze solid.

Before Covid hit, buses dropped revelers off in great numbers. Now Wassail is back.  A county tradition revived. Time, once more, to brush off the pre-winter blues. Now that we are retired, Vida and I will hit as many of the wineries as possible, possibly wearing our 2008 crowns and mangling the wassail song.

Dark and cold come early now

With winter drawing near,

But vines abed in our good soils

We toast with hearty cheer!