French Confréries Gourmandes & Bandas du Sud-Ouest

The form revives medieval guilds. The Chaîne des Rôtisseurs traces its lineage to a Paris roasters' guild documented in 1248 under Louis IX, and the Jurade de Saint-Émilion goes back to a charter of privileges granted in 1199 under John, King of England. Most brotherhoods you can join today, though, are twentieth-century revivals built to defend a region's produce through lean years, like the Chevaliers du Tastevin, founded at Nuits-Saint-Georges in 1934. The banda-and-feria side is younger and Spanish-inflected: the Fêtes de Bayonne launched in 1932, staged by members of the Aviron Bayonnais rugby club, borrowing the bull-feria calendar and the paso doble sound from just across the border.

At a confrérie chapter you usually arrive as somebody's guest, seated at a long banquet table while robed members process in, and the ceremony lands half solemn and half wink: an oath, a mock-grand proclamation, a tap of the shoulder, then a very long meal. Nobody joins cold, you are proposed and sponsored (parrainage), and a visiting newcomer is often the one pulled up front to be inducted as an honorary member for the night. On the banda side you fold in by playing, so you bring an instrument that carries outdoors, learn the section's paso dobles, and you march with them, because the audition here is simply keeping up with the book while walking.