The Art and Ardour of Vine Pruning

Winter means pruning. To be precise at Coney Wines 11,000 vines to lop, strip and laydown. It’s a bigger job than digging the garden plot but then again you have plenty of time - July, August and a bit of September.  Pruning is best regarded as a primitive form of therapy. There are other more robust words to describe it but therapeutic is the most charitable.

Once I was silly enough to do the rough arithmetic. At the snail-like pace of the Coney vineyard shuffle it would take 4 months of dawn till dusk daily toil to complete. A task worthy of Sysiphus - the Greek guy condemned to pushing a boulder to the top of the hill and then doing endless repeats.

MITTENED HANDS

Beneath these mittens lie hoary hands which do the pruning and allow us to claim that Coney wines are hand crafted. Nobody will risk shaking Coney’s mitts while they are encased because it looks as if he’s got some rampant skin condition or maybe even leprosy.

ORIGINAL PLANT BEFORE PRUNING

To the layman plants at the end of last year’s vintage look like a tangled mess (which they are). The pruners job is to lop at the strategic points, stripping out the superfluous canes and wrapping the four remaining canes along the fruiting wire ready for budburst in September.

WRAPPING

The last pruning operation is to wrap the canes along the fruiting wire. This needs to be done properly like everything else if you don’t want to be punished later. So, not one or two winds but three or four to make sure the plant’s nicely anchored against a howling nor-wester, secured at the end of the cane with a trusty twisty tie (an example of onomatopoeia I think, if you remember your figures of speech from college).

TRELLIS SYSTEMS/LENGTH OF CANES

There are quite a few trellis systems for training grapes.  Most people in Martinborough use VSP - vertical shoot positioning. Not surprisingly this means the new shoots and eventually canes, go straight up. 

When trimmed in December they turn into a pleasing-looking hedge.  Not so for the plant we’ve been looking at, which is in the Syrah block. They tell you afterwards, and therefore too late, that Syrah should be planted in the most sheltered part of the vineyard. Unlike Sauvignon Blanc whose canes are stiff and erect, Syrah is flaccid and floppy. Any woman will tell you the difference I’m told. So sometimes in a Syrah plant, you will come across a diagonal cane shunted by the wind. Instead of being the standard 1.2 metres long it will have grown into the next bay and could be 3 metres long (like the one I’m holding). 

Just thought you’d like to know.

STARTING OUT

You can’t start pruning before the leaves fall and sap stops running from the cuts. This means waiting for a couple of frosts. Normally it’s late June before enthusiasts break out and sharpen the secateurs. Here’s the shuffling gait of an enthusiastic pruner at 7.30 am heading towards row 78. His sophisticated pruning gear hangs loosely about his neck and loins.

Sometimes there’s a -3 degree frost to stiffen most (but not all) extremities.

As Captain Oats intoned “I’m just going outside and I may be some time”.

There’s a remedy for cold hands. I’ve been reading a book about an Aussie reprobate caught up in Afghanistan during the Russian campaign, with temperatures permanently under zero. He kept his hands warm by peeing on them. It hasn’t come to this at Coneys because we have warm water available at the house.

THE TOOLS OF THE TRADE

Big loppers for the main cuts. Secateurs for tidying up and slashing your wrists. Saw for major surgery. Sealant for cuts. Like limbs, the fresh wounds can bleed a bit and provide a convenient point for pathogens to enter and infect the plant, so we seal any big cuts.

The humble twisty tie to secure next year’s canes on the wire.  At three or four per plant, we use over 40,000 of these little blighters!

SIZING UP EACH PLANT

Here, Coney sums up the plant balefully, trying to work out where to make his cuts. Experienced pruners seem to do this instinctively, and at speed. This requires an IQ. Coney uses a more cautious approach which mathematicians would call “successive approximations”; on the principle that a cane once cut cannot be glued back in place. And so instead of going straight to the correct answer, he homes in on it. This takes longer, is safer, but also slower.

RIPPING OUT THE CANES

Ripping out the cut canes requires a sharp tug. You need to avert your face because occasionally an adjacent cane will get hooked to the one you’re yanking. The result is a sharp whack across the face or eye. Extremely painful - lash is a better word than whack.  When it happens there is screaming and bad language which can be heard throughout Martinborough “those Coneys are having another domestic.” The resulting welt on the pruners face is certainly more impressive than the mild discolouration on the face of Johnny Depp’s wife after he’d flung the phone at her.  

We used to burn our prunings. In total, they are the size of a small house. When lit on a calm day things are OK. When an unscheduled northerly springs up though, optimism is challenged. Social embarrassment, and the cost of replacing the neighbour’s house and animal stock act as a deterrent to burning. 

We mulch.

PRUNINGS

Cane prunings are carefully placed in the middle of the row so the mulcher can deal to them tidily. The sheep had other ideas and have turned relative order into relative chaos. Offended by this chaos (in 2006 I think) and while I was losing the last of my marbles I raked the entire vineyard to make sure the mulcher got every cane. 

Never again!

SHEEP

These fatties imported from a neighbouring farmer to control the grass can hardly waddle over the irrigation wire in their relentless search for the perfect blade of grass. For them, the grass is always greener (they also add a bit of poop for organic health).

That’s it until next year!