It's March and we're deep into pruning season at Frenchtown Farms. Pruning is truly one of our favorite times of the year. It's the season of endless possibilities - before bud break, the spring rush of growth, the heat of summer, and the threats of frost or fire. This will be a once in a lifetime vintage! Perhaps... But first, we prune.
How does pruning affect the vine?
Vines are planted in fixed locations, yet the dimension of time flows through the vineyard. When you prune, you are making both a short-term and long-term deal with your vine. In exchange for a place to thrive, the vine gives you grapes. Pruning is the organizing force that encourages the vine to cooperate with our production goals in a way that is valuable to us humans. The vine doesn't actually care about wine, and producing grapes is only one of its survival strategies. Pruning is essentially an insult to the vine, however, it is necessary for growing wine in a productive way on a trellis and in rows. With a shady spot by a river, tall trees to climb, and birds to harvest and spread the seeds, a vine is self sufficient, but in a vineyard humans and vines have to work together to grow.
Skilled pruning has the goal of maintaining harmony between available resources and energy reserves. Every time we make a cut into the wood we are setting off a chemical chain of responses that affect the quality and quantity of fruit for the season. There are also long term consequences of each pruning cut that play out in the vine's growth and health for the rest of its life. The vine remembers every cut you make, forever.
Can you taste pruning decisions in the wine?
The motivations of the farmer and wine maker are often in opposition, especially in America, where these are usually different people and different corporate entities, both trying to make a profit. Generally speaking, the farmer wants quantity or yield and the winemaker wants quality or concentration, whereas the vine simply wants to be in harmony. It is helpful to envision that each vine has a fixed amount of energy or flavor, and that energy can be divided up between many clusters or a few. Since winemakers pay for fruit by weight, this creates an unhealthy tension between grower and maker that causes both the consumer and vineyard to suffer. As a winegrower you can resolve much of this tension by wearing both hats and essentially brokering deals between the vine and the wine. You can negotiate or make compromises with aspects such as yield vs concentration, irrigation or harvest timing in order to best provide for the vineyard and the consumer. This becomes a matter of ethical choices on behalf of the vine and the drinker, and perhaps the most important of these decisions is pruning.
Each time we engage with a vine in the winter to prune it, we are first assessing its performance the previous season. Did we give it too much or too little work? As with humans, vines need the right amount of challenge in order to be healthy, happy, and to build character. If given too little to do, the vine can find unproductive and unhealthy ways to spend its time, often engaging in self destructive behavior, whereas too much work and stress can cause the vine to produce poor quality and immature results (sound familiar?). These "deals" between the vine and the wine need to be highly iterative throughout many vintages in order to have a healthy vineyard. It is our job as pruners to think about the past and the future rather than the present. As in human affairs, a win-win negotiation can lead to a healthy relationship, whereas if one party exploits the other, or does not recognize past grievance, then future deals are unlikely without coercion.
Pruning choices are the beginning stages of your experience in the glass that we perceive as concentration, acidity, texture, ripeness, balance, and length. When we come up to a vine in winter, we ask each one how it's doing, how the previous year went, and what kind of year it might like to have moving forward. This "conversation" between the vine and the winegrower is an attempt to create harmony between wine quality and the vine health. Pruning choices set the amount of fruit each vine has the potential to carry for the year, creating a direct link between the terroir and the experience in your glass. This requires you to ask questions of each vine individually and the task of pruning needs to be executed with two kinds of love in mind - the unconditional love that gives, and the demanding love that challenges.
Every time you grip your pruners and decide to remove a portion of the vine you must be conscious that you are entering a negotiation with the plant. Every cut is a burden that you are asking the vine to shoulder in the service of making wine of a particular form and function. Pruning is fundamentally a wound and a mutilation to the vine, even if done with expert care and attention. The activity ultimately reduces the vitality and lifespan of the vine each time it is performed. The skill with which pruning is performed will determine whether the vine declines and dies after 20 years, or thrives and produces value for a hundred years or more.
What is sap flow?
The technical aspects of pruning are in the realm of the dialectic and not something that can be conveyed in an essay. Like explaining how to kiss, or how to do plumbing, this is not something you learn by reading. What is important for the modern wine lover to know is that there are a few people in France and Italy doing amazing work over the past two decades who have rediscovered and reimagined the craft of pruning. We say "rediscovered" because these methods were known and documented well over 100 years ago, but were largely forgotten during the period when tractors, mechanization, herbicides and pesticides took over Europe. Technology caused us to view the vineyard as a "grape factory" with simple inputs and outputs, and we stopped having individual interactions with each vine. Instead of treating vines as commodities with a finite lifespan, these recently resurrected traditional methods focus on preserving the sap flow or vascular pathways of the vine. These techniques have begun to make their way into the American vine growing scene, thanks to some brilliant online resources and translations of French texts to English. Change is happening, albeit slowly, as farmers tend to be a conservative bunch. If you're interested in more on these technical aspects we are providing a list of links and resources at the end of the essay.
Energy vs Entropy, Chaos vs Order
One theme we will continuously return to throughout the course of these essays is the exploration of the opponent forces of order and chaos, manifested as human energy attempting to bring order to the natural entropy that pulls the environment into chaos. Pruning is perhaps the most obvious and visible of these actions. Our modern world often idealizes nature as a benevolent and constructive force, but it is actually the bringer of chaos and disorder, destruction, and decomposition, and this is a crucial role in the cycle of death and rebirth that creates our world. We accept that in the cellar, if we want to practice low intervention winemaking, we must work cleanly, creating order in the winery to avoid problems such as bacteria, brettanomyces, and volatile acidity. There are a whole host of forces trying to unravel a stable wine into a state of decay and it is up to the cellar worker to protect the wines from this natural entropy. In the vineyard, the farmer is faced with the same challenges from the same underlying forces.
When we come to a vine with the intention of pruning it, we are first observing the chaos that manifested the previous year. We are attempting to create a physical structure in the vine that produces balance between the vineyard and the wine. In order to express terroir in a meaningful way, both the vine and the wine must be stabilized in time. This is how value is created in any commodity, and the winegrower is attempting to harmonize the value of the vineyard with the value of the resulting wines as a function across time that we call vintages.
An expertly pruned vineyard becomes a stable crop and can even increase its stock of value over the years as the roots dig ever deeper. A wine made from such a vineyard is inherently stable and enduring, and it conveys the truth of the land, rather than some idea in a winemaker's head. When that bottle of wine is eventually opened, all of the energy and effort, emotion and toil, come pouring out into the glass, like a conversion of potential energy into a kinetic force of culture. These special wines can change and enhance our lives in ways that have deep meaning for those that consume them. We both abruptly changed our careers and started farming shortly after tasting one of these wines. In our own vineyards, we are humbled by the terroir and the potential of the vines, and we are working as hard as we can to be worthy of them by improving our farming, our cellar work, and our communication every season.
Yours in Growing,
Aaron and Cara in Frenchtown
Links & Resources
Below are a few links to resources for those who really want to get into the technical aspects of pruning. The best way to learn to prune is to work the same vineyard for at least three years so you can see the effects of your cuts, but starting with the theory never hurts!
Created by Simonit & Sirch, a world-renowned vine pruning consulting company, the Vine Master Pruners Academy has free videos that give a general overview of pruning in a few different training styles. You can also pay for the full course which includes more in-depth videos, quizzes, and a cool certificate upon completion.
Simonit & Sirch Pruning Method
If you’re looking for a quick overview, this is a visual guide to the Simonit & Sirch pruning method that explains the basics.
Changes to Be Made to Vine Pruning by René Lafon
This 2022 translation of a book published in 1921 highlights the dramatic pendulum swing in viticultural knowledge that occurred during the 20th century. The techniques that were heralded as cutting edge, even controversial, were forgotten during the upheaval of World War II and the agricultural revolution that followed. After the war, artificial fertilizers and mechanization dominated all areas of agriculture, and much of the core knowledge of what makes a healthy plant system was lost. The rediscovery of these basic principles of vine health has been an exciting era for those of us dedicated to growing holistically.
A beautifully written essay. Thanks C&A
Always in admiration of your hard, thoughtful and intelligently philosophical and spontaneous work.
Simon