Monthly Archives: March 2010

The Glamorous Art of Pruning, Part 1

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Posted by Gus on March 29, 2010 – 1:59 pm
Filed under In The Vineyard

So much goes into making a good bottle of wine. Besides the requisite rows of polished stainless tanks and candle-lit chestnut-hooped barrels, there is the furrowed brow of the philosophical winemaker and the vast, imposing backdrop of the arched and pillared winery itself. Surely there is little significance, and certainly less glamor, out in the muddy, dormant vineyard in winter?

Winemakers joke about the most important tool of their trade. For some it is their nose, for some a mop, and now, perhaps, it is even the ubiquitous Blackberry, iPhone, or the like. For me, just ahead of my bicycle, it is a pair of pruning shears. Mine are standard-issue Felco no. 2. I don’t use them as frequently or as vigorously as I used to, but they accompany me on critical trips to the vineyard.

Pruning is not glamorous. It is done in unpleasant weather, all day long, quite monotonously. It is not highly-paid work, and rarely garners public attention like a pressing or a bottling might. Yet the well-executed art of the pruner lays the foundation for the production of all high-quality wines.

Left to its own devices, a grapevine will produce a tangle of shoots, in the hope that one or two will find their way to the top of a tree and produce some fruit there which may prove attractive to a passing bird, thereby assuring the continuity of the species. In brief, the goal of pruning (and subsequent vine management) is to fool the vine into thinking that every one of its grape clusters is so ideally positioned, and therefore to pack every berry with maximum flavor for the fortunate bird. Pruning is also the first, and most important, step in controlling yield, helping assure that the vine’s limited resources are allocated to only as much fruit as can confidently achieve ripeness.

All pruning methods are some adaptation of either cane or spur pruning – two words which capture the somewhat punitive nature of the task. Whether one is employing one of the many common variations on the theme, including guyot, bi-lateral cordon, lyre, Scott Henry, or simple head-pruning, one is still making use of either a cane, shown here,

or a spur, shown here,

to achieve the above goals of fruit-positioning and crop limitation. The obvious difference is that the spur pruning method makes use of several short sections of last-year’s growth to provide this year’s fruiting wood, while the cane pruning method employs one or two longer canes per vine. Thus, while both vines may have been pruned to, say, twenty buds per vine, the cane-pruned vine achieves this with two ten-bud canes, while the spur pruned vine achieves it with ten two-bud spurs. Sharp eyes will notice that the above cane-pruned vine also has one spur on each side, to provide next year’s cane and  spur.

Why should this matter? Pruning style is usually determined by varietal, region, and the preferences of the vineyard manager. Certain varietals may bear fruit more consistently when cane pruned, especially those varietals which do not have very fruitful basal buds – the first bud on the shoot, which is always one of the two or three buds left on a spur. Other varietals perform better when spur pruned, and would yield inconsistently on a cane. Vineyards in cooler regions tend to lean more towards cane pruning, since it is a type of pruning that provides a degree of insurance against wild swings in crop load by not relying solely on the fruitfulness of the first two or three buds on a shoot. Those first few buds are the first to form, and therefore are the most likely to have developed during cold weather, a challenge which can restrict their tendency to bear fruit.

The cane vs. spur decision is also frequently a matter of logistics. Spur pruning of any sort is generally easier to teach and practice, and requires less subjective decision-making on the part of the person wielding the shears. This can be a relief to the vineyard manager looking for absolute consistency in the vineyard, where the varying pruning styles of individual workers does not have any real impact on the shape of the vines from row to row.

Cane pruning is often considered more of an art. The pruner must look at the vine as a whole, select a new fruiting cane of adequate girth, length, and position, make a cut to improve or maintain the desired shape of the vine, then take the added step of planning for the following year by leaving a renewal spur in a location that won’t interfere with the shoots growing from the fruiting cane, and that will maintain a low vine head. A skilled pruner enjoys the challenges of cane pruning, but when it is done badly it can create a lot of extra work in the vineyard.

The look of a cane pruned vineyard in early spring is unmistakable: light, airy, orderly and elegant.

In part two I will explore how two neighboring vineyards employ different pruning tactics, and why.

The New World Winery Continuum

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Posted by Gus on March 2, 2010 – 12:08 pm
Filed under A Matter Of Style

The act of drinking a glass of wine is nearly always, in some small way, coupled with the act of envisioning the source of that wine, which is usually some variation on the theme of rolling vineyards adjacent to an historic stone (old world) or wooden (new world) winery. This image exists in part because it can actually be true, and partly because the hard-working souls who put the wine in the bottle want you to believe it is true, but it is very often pure illusion.

This is in no way a bad thing. The fact is that the very definition of a winery falls on a rather broad continuum, from ancient bricks and mortar to the genuinely virtual. What really matters is what is in the glass.

In the old world, or Europe for simplicity, if the wine is even moderately expensive one can rest fairly comfortably on the notion that, indeed, hand-tended vineyards adjoin the vine-covered cellars. Complexity sets in, however, when a château releases a second label, or produces a domaine-appellation wine alongside its estate product. Throw in the grower cooperatives and, of course, the négociants, and it becomes considerably more difficult to answer the question, “which winery made this wine?” The savvy consumer of old world wine, therefore, is guided more by name, reputation, and appellation of origin than by an image of a grand château.

The new world has managed to re-imagine the winery even more thoroughly. By casting out the vision of bricks, mortar and estate vineyards as essential, the new world wine industry has re-defined a winery to be, quite simply, a vision.

Examples of this wine vision fall at many points along the new world winery continuum. One of the most commonly understood is the winery which does its own winemaking but purchases all of its grapes. Or, a winery may be simply a vineyard, growing and harvesting grapes which are then brought to a contracted wine production facility, where the wine is “custom crushed” and eventually bottled under the vineyard’s own label. Custom crush can also be a way for a winemaker to fulfill a vision, by overseeing his own production at a facility hosting more than one, and often several, wine “visionaries”. In some cases the visionary may be neither winemaker nor grape grower, but someone passionate enough to make an investment in wine production and willing to both purchase grapes and contract the winemaking for the project.

Of course, vision aside, every wine must have begun in a vineyard and finished up in a wine cellar. Yet the multitude of means to the end creates a range of opportunities for the would-be wine producer, and consequently allows for the availability of a broad range of wine styles to the consumer. When a winery no longer has to overcome the significant economic barriers to establishing the traditional vineyard and production facility, the industry is no longer the exclusive domain of wealthy individuals or large corporations. The resulting infusion of small to medium scale wineries, some entirely working with purchased grapes and shared facilities, results in many wines which share the same essential attributes of their more traditionally-produced brethren: a distinctly regional stamp of style and an individual stamp of character.

Consumers and wineries alike should absolutely embrace this continuum, as much as it may undermine the romantic definition of a winery, as a natural adaptation of the wine industry to the challenge of bringing interesting, enjoyable wines spanning a broad range of styles to the public. A winery, defined, is really no more than a way to bring an experience to one’s glass. The business model it applies to reach that goal is of little consequence to the wine itself.