St. Martin’s Day forecast
So far this has been an autumn of contrasts. The weather has swung pendulum-like between the sublime and the ‘meh’, with periods of brilliant days of crispness alternating with fog, drizzle, penetrating greyness. I have not heard a forecast for the upcoming weekend. Saturday is the feast day of Saint Martin, and any forecast that might be forthcoming would be a sort of a meta-forecast. It’s been a year and a half since I last mentioned this holiday:
“St. Martin’s Day, the holiday in November when the new wine is ready, is a sort of Groundhog Day-in-reverse thing: if the weather is fair on St. Martin’s Day, it means that it will snow soon [...] if it’s cloudy or rainy, it forecasts a mild late autumn, green Christmas, and lots of snow in the spring. [...] for the last two years the Martinova forecast has been spot-on.”
In addition to a Farmer’s Almanac-like weather prediction, Martinmas, Martinovo, or Martinovanje features that magical moment when the recent harvest’s grape juice and must can magically be considered new wine (which suddenly tends to flow). St. Martin’s connection to wine is somewhat tenuous, though his local ties are slightly less so: born around 316 AD in westernmost Hungary, son of a Roman soldier stationed in Pavia, Italy, he’s likely to have passed through this valley at some point, and he later served as a solider himself in transalpine Gaul (currently known as ‘France’). He is considered a sort of Johnny Appleseed of viticulture, and is even credited with discovering the importance of pruning after watching a donkey (that perennial mother of invention) chewing on vines.
We’ll see what Martin says about the upcoming winter’s weather.
(The photo above shows a vineyard a few hundred meters from my place of work. Slovenia’s landscape does not suck.)
