Allan Appel Photo
Wooly Grapers Crystal Manning, Tracy Peters, Marlana Rugg, and Patty Shea toasting and knitting.
During the grueling,endless winter, Fair Havener Tambira Armmand, a knitter, sewer, and all-round creative textile person, came down with a bad case of cabin fever. Suddenly she looked out her window, and spotted the solution.
She approached friend and neighbor Chris Fiore, who runs the Grand Vin wine store near the Grand Avenue Bridge. She inquired if his place might be interested in hosting a regular get-together of creative folks, a case of cabin fever not necessarily required for participation.
Armand with a glass of frascati and Wooly Grape first-time attendee Zoe Middleton.
It just so happened Fiore had recently finished renovating the back room of Grand Vin. It would be perfect for Armmand’s purpose, and for wine tastings.
Thus came into being the Wooly Grape – wooly for textiles, and grape for imbibing all those reds and whites prior to and maybe even contributing to the casual networking and crafts talk.
The Wooly Grape has been meeting at Grand Vin the first three Wednesdays of every month since January. Armmand’s envisions the Wooly Grape becoming the little engine that could generate new visitors, new creative investments, and new interest in what she feels is the most beautiful neighborhood in New Haven
The gathering now attracts from half a dozen to 15 people a month with a unique format. The first 40 minutes is a wine tasting, casual but also sophisticated (costs $5) conducted by Fiore (pictured). It’s followed by an informal sharing of the creative life of the attendees, be they sewers, writers, visual artists, entrepreneurs, you name it.
A member of the Grove, Chatham Square Neighborhood Association, and Elm City Cycling, and a practical optimist, Armmand is taking the networking, one-person-talking-to-another approach of those organizations and adapting it to throw particular light on the under-appreciated (by outsiders) glories of the neighborhoods surrounding the Grand Avenue Bridge.
“I think New Haven needs to branch out” and see different parts of town, she said. “In my biased opinion, Fair Haven is the most beautiful year-round neighborhood” in the city.
“We want to help people live fulfilled lives outside of their work. We want to welcome people here, build community, and support the store,” she added.
Over the months the gatherings have included pot lucks, movie talk, demonstrations of chair caning, and last week, an exchange of craft supplies, mainly a wide range of yarns.
Wooly Graper Tracy Peters (pictured) was working on a new project, a pair of socks. “It combines two of my passions. I’m a knitter and I enjoy wine,” she said.
Peters, who hails from Cheshire, said she brings a knitting project that doesn’t require full concentration, because it’s the talk she particularly enjoys as well, after, of course, a taste of a few different wines.
The skein meets the cava.
At last week’s gathering, Grand Vin’s Chris Fiore delivered a tasting/lecture on obscure Italian white wines. As the group cycled through tasting a nontraditional cava (containing pinot noir and chardonnay grapes), a frascati, and a trebbiano, Fiore reminded the Wooly Grapers of the four Ss of tasting: See it, Swirl it, Smell it, and then Sip it.
The fifth S is “smile” and the sixth S is to “slug” it down, someone quipped from behind the skeins of yarn that filled up the table at Grand Vin’s cozy back room.
Zoe Middleton asked if storing a wine in her kitchen is a good idea. Fiore called that a wine no-no because of temperature fluctuation.
Then someone asked him what’s the best toast he, as a wine maven, has ever heard. Answer: his grandfather’s simple Italian toast, “buona salute!” Which means “good health!”
Lenox Avenue’s Mary Abbot separates yarn above the bottles.
The conversation then migrated from evaluating the various contributed knitting supplies to the deeper meaning of knitting. The Wooly Grape is not exclusively about this craft, but of the nine attendees this night seven had brought boucle or ribbon yarns and other varieties and worked away while conversing.
Armmand reminded a reporter that although all the evening’s Wooly Grapers happened to be women, knitting was originally a male preserve. It’s useful and meditative at the same time, she added.
Marlana Rugg said she has a male friend who turned to knitting to de-stress and lower his blood pressure. Now he runs a knitting store.
“You’re lucky you have a knitter in your life,” Armmand said, quoting an old folk saying.
Fair Haven is also lucky to have the Wooly Grape as an addition to its community life.