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, or a spur 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.
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.
In part two I will explore how two neighboring vineyards employ different pruning tactics, and why.
Gus Janeway
Food Fight
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