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...