And they're off! Here we go for year number two of pruning. It's hard to believe that we have already come full-circle. As you know we are farming our vineyards bio-dynamically and according to the Maria Thun, Biodynamic Sowing and Planting Calendar 2006, we officially entered Northern Planting Time on Friday the 13th of January. So there we were Friday morning ready to prune prune prune! Standing at the bottom of our largest vineyard looking up, the task seems very daunting, yet exciting at the same time. We are very lucky in that are vineyards are located in an idyllic spot, far from busy roads and ugly developments, the only sites you see are the beautiful medieval village of Castillon du Gard, surrounded by vineyards, woodlands, and various orchards including olives and apricots and cherries. It's a great place to spend your day shaping the vines, thinking of this year's harvest and what it will be like. Will it be hot and dry again, or will we get enough rain to get us through this year? Will we have an abundance of grapes this time, or will it be like last year when we had a very small crop? Will the grenache be as black and inky as it was in 2005 or will it be more typically light in color? All of these things are running through your mind. As well as questions like, since we aren't using any herbicides, how on earth are we going to control all of these weeds? We started pruning in the same spot we started last year, and boy can we see how much we learned over the course of year. We've found lots of vines that were, shall we say, badly pruned? No, not us, we were so careful and conscientious. Yes, it's true we are finding lots of mistakes, let's just hope we find less and less as we go! One of the biggest constraints with biodynamics is that you can only prune when the moon and the constellations are aligned in the right position, which means, only two weeks per month. It's nice of course to prune for two weeks and then have two weeks off, but at the same time it's frustrating, when for example, the weather is beautiful and you could be out there pruning, but you're not in Northern Planting Time. This year we have .75 hectares more to prune, I hope we can get it all done!