la gramiere

Pruning 101

             

                   

 

Pruning 101.  If you ask any vigneron around here, they'll tell you that the most important work you do for making wine is in the vineyard, after that the wine makes itself. Pruning, for most vignerons, is the most important of the most important. It's an art that is learned in the field, not from a book. Last year when we desperately needed to learn how to prune our newly purchased vineyards, we wanted to learn from someone who was passionate about it. That man turned out to be Gérard GAUBY of Domaine Gauby in the Roussillon. Monty Walden in his book, Biodynamic Wines, says of him: "Pruning is the task which makes Gauby most animated, for it is the rock upon which a wine-grower's life is built. 'My father would clip me round the ear with a vine shoot if I pruned poorly.'  Luckily, when I worked for Kermit Lynch, we imported Gauby's wines, so I already had an "in". My good friend and wine journalist Michel Bettane also offered to call Gauby and put in a good word for us. It always helps to have connections! So we set out very early on a Saturday morning in January to spend some time with M. Gauby. We brought some pictures that we had taken of some of our vines and we started by going throught them and talking about what to cut off, what to save, if anything. His first comment was that he always prefers to try to save an old vine even if it means sawing off all but one of the arms and trying to re-generate it from there. Secondly both he and his son Lionel were encouraged by the fact that there was grass planted in every other row and also by the fact that there were some weeds and other native plants growing around the vines. That meant that there was some life still left in the soil and that all of the organic matter hadn't been chemically obliterated. Great news!
We then headed out to the vineyards armed with our shiny new Felco pruners we chose a vine and he started pruning it to show us how. All of our vines except for one vineyard are pruned "en gobelet" or "head pruned" as they call it in California. That means that they are not trained on wires and the arms are in a circular shape, like that of a goblet. This is the way most vines in southern France were pruned until the advent of tractors and harvesting machines. The most important thing according to Gauby is to open the center so that it doesn't get too dense so that air can circulate, this will cut down on various things like mildew, oidium and even habitat for bad bugs. Then you want to favor the bigger of the two shoots that grew from last year, but always keeping in mind the shape, so that if you must leave the smaller one in order to keep the center open then you leave that one... Oh this is getting too complicated. Let me take some more pictures and I'll try again! Bear with me here...

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!

Malolactic Fermentation

Warming the wine... Well, yes, that is what we decided to do last week. While talking to the enologist and tasting through all of the different vats of wine, we came to the conclusion, that if we want to bottle any of the wine in the spring, we'll have to warm it a bit so that the malo-lactic fermentation will finish. None of the vats have completed the malo-lactic fermentation, a process which is absolutely necessary before bottling. This winter has been exceptionally cold here in southern France with temperatures dipping well below zero in mid-November. Since we don't yet have doors on the winery, the wine also dipped quite low, 3 degrees Celsius to be exact! At that temperature, nothing is going to happen. So together with the enologist we decided to try to gently heat the wine up in hopes that the "malo" as we call it for short, would kick in and finish. The biggest question was, how exactly could we accomplish this. The first idea we had was to try to rig up the radiator-like apparatus that we used during harvest to cool the wine to the house boiler so that we could circulate super hot water through it. This would have entailed trying to add another "radiator" to our heating system and was quickly abandoned due to the need for meters and meters of insulated hose. The only other option that wouldn't have cost us thousands of euros, was to borrow a heating unit very similar to those travel water heaters that you stick in a mug to boil water for coffee or tea when you're on the road. This seemed like an "ok" idea so we went to see the mayor of our village who also has a winery and is very well equipped to see if he had one that we could borrow. Indeed he did! He happily loaned it to us, so off we went. We let it sit in the winery for a couple of days, neither one of us very eager to stick this thing in our wine. You can imagine how hot a thing like that has to get in order to heat 400 liters of wine. I kept thinking, "How is this going to change the flavor of our wine, and is this really the best thing for us to do." Matt, my genius husband, was luckily thinking the same thing, and came up with an alternative plan... What if we stuck the heating unit in the water of the milk tank that we used to chill the water during harvest, once the water is hot enough we use a submersible pump to circulate the water through the panels that we used to chill the wine during harvest! Brilliant! He came up with the perfect solution! This way we could very gently warm up the wine. We started at 5 degrees last Wednesday, slowly heated it to 18 degrees and we are now trying to maintain it until the malo is finished. We have already seen the results! There are fine little bubbles on the tops of the vats and every once-in-awhile, several bubbles escape from below the surface of the wine and make a wonderful "gloog, gloog" sound! Yeah Matt!!!!!