The Festival That Almost Wasn’t – 118th Annual Brierly Harvest Festival

The hundred-and-eighteenth Brierly Harvest Festival was the one the town remembered as the Festival That Almost Wasn't. It was held in the worst year the settlement had known, when a long drought came within a breath of ending the festival altogether, and out of that failure the town drew not a vintage but a second rite — the Shared Pour.

The drought had held the land for the better part of a year. The rains did not come, the sun baked the soil of the Brierly Plains to cracked dust, and the Whitmore River — the settlement's lifeline since its founding, the water that fed every vineyard on the slopes — shrank to a thread and then to a chain of stagnant pools among the stones of its bed. The vines withered on their trellises, their leaves curling and dropping, and by the season's end the harvest had all but failed. What grapes the slopes gave were barely enough to eat. There were none to spare for the press.

Brierly faced the loss alone, as it faced everything. The settlement had stood cut off from any world but its own for the better part of a century; no relief could be sent for, no wine brought in, no help summoned from beyond the valley. Whatever the town had to meet the drought with, it already held, and what it held was almost nothing. The drought was a trial not of the land but of the people, and it fell on a community that had no one to lean on but itself.

As the festival drew near, the settlement confronted a thing it had never confronted: the festival kept with no new wine to pour. Only once before had the town gone without a First Pour, and that had been the year, long in the past, when the festival was set aside entirely in mourning. It had never been held with empty casks. To many in Brierly it seemed it should not be held at all — that a festival of plenty, kept in a year of want, would be a mockery of both.

Eleanor Fairchild would not let it lapse. Of the founding healer's line and a respected vintner in her own right, she carried the proposal before the assembled town in the Town Hall, where the mood had already settled into defeat. If the land would give the settlement no new wine, she argued, then the settlement would give wine to itself. Each household would bring a single cup from its own reserves — whatever it had kept back from better years — and the cups would be poured together in the square into one communal cask.

The idea met resistance. The festival had always been a celebration of the year just past, of the new harvest and the wine it gave, a thing that looked forward rather than back; to broach the old reserves instead was to turn the festival around on itself. But against the alternative of no festival at all, the town came round. It would be held.

On the festival evening the people of Brierly came to the square carrying what they had — bottles, flasks, and small casks, some handed down from fathers and grandmothers, some holding vintages long thought too precious ever to open. One by one they emptied them into a single great cask: deep wines and light ones, the work of many years and many families, mingling into a blend no vineyard had made or could make again. Eleanor drew the first cup from it into a plain wooden vessel and drank.

She told the town what the cup held. It was not the harvest of a single year, she said, nor the wine of a single vineyard, but the years behind them and the work of all of them together; and they drank from it not to abundance, of which they had none, but to perseverance, of which they had enough. The settlement endured. That was the toast, and the town took it up.

The festival that followed was the humblest in living memory. There was no triumph of a new vintage at its heart, and the feast was thin against the better years; but the lanterns were lit and the square was full, and Brierly sang and drank and danced not to its success but to its survival. It celebrated, in a year that had given it nothing, the one thing the year could not take.

What Eleanor Fairchild had made was not a lesser First Pour but its inverse — a rite for lean years where the First Pour was a rite for fat ones, a drinking-together in scarcity to set against the drinking-together in plenty. The town called it the Shared Pour, and kept it for hard times alone. The festival that had almost not happened proved, in the end, the surest demonstration of what the festival had always been for.