The Middle Ages saw the creation of guilds made up of masters and workers - or in Burgundy’s case where land had a special role, landowners and those who worked their vineyards – forging solid bonds of cordial empathy and favouring mutual help in practical and material ways. At the same moment, on the religious level, confraternities or brotherhoods were set up so that wine growers could help and support each other in their spiritual needs.

Each brotherhood was under the protection of its own guardian saint whose staff was carried in ceremonial processions by the brotherhood’s staff-bearer.

The French Revolution abolished both guilds and brotherhoods. However, the latter re-emerged in the course of the nineteenth century, generally in the guise of mutual aid societies or associations whose purpose was to help those wine growers, now themselves owners of small parcels of land, brought low by poverty and old age, to pay doctors’ fees, or for funerals or to arrange the celebration of a mass for the dead.

The brotherhoods had then to endure a period of fierce anticlericalism, often leading to divisions among themselves, and by 1934, they had become listless, ossified institutions, the flaming torch of religious faith having shrunk to a flickering wick.

The Saint-Vincent Tournante was the catalyst which led to the renaissance of the many associations dedicated to St Vincent in Burgundy’s wine-growing country. In 1938, there were 6 associations in the procession consecrated to the saint, in 1965, this had grown to 53, and in 2003, there were over 70.