When driving through a wine region on holiday you could be forgiven for thinking that the vines just get on with it themselves while the vignerons sit on their terraces drinking rosé. Sadly you’d be mistaken.
Grape growing is a pretty intensive business, in a painting the Forth Bridge sort of way. No sooner have you finished one task than another comes galloping into view. After harvest (mid-late October for us here in SW France) and before pruning starts in December is really the only time when the vineyards are deserted (well, other than the pre-winter ploughing of course).
This year, in addition to the normal vineyard work, we have some big plans for our vines. For the vineyard geeks amongst you here’s a preview. For the rest of you lovely readers just take it from us that we’ll be outside a lot this year.
We’re very happy to be moving to working the soil mechanically under the vines (in place of using a herbicide). By all accounts the first year is going to be tough both getting the hang of a new piece of machinery and also turning over pretty rocky soil that hasn’t been disturbed for many years.
This year we’re part of a small research group run by l’Institut Français de la Vigne et du Vin (IFV) looking at ecological ground cover – different grasses and other crops in and around the vines to add/release nutrients, reduce erosion, limit/increase vine vigour etc etc. I felt such a fraud in the initial meeting surrounded by such experienced vitculteurs but they were all “très sympa” and I think it’ll be a great resource for us. We’re going to experiment with sowing grasses to compete in a parcel of Braucol so hopefully reducing the vines’ vigour and ultimately raising the quality of the fruit.
We want to slightly increase the size of the vineyard and also the number of varieties we grow so in November we’ll be planting half a hectare each of Prunelard and Len de l’El, 2 very local ancient varieties. You have no idea how much paperwork and planning is involved in this. The whole process takes about 2 years from notifying the authorities, verifying that we have planting rights available, applying for a grant, selecting the varieties and root stocks, ordering the plants, booking someone to prepare the site and plant the vines. It’s big job and that’s before you’ve started taking care of the delicate young vines themselves which are vulnerable to rabbits, drought, frost etc etc. It’s also 3 years before the vines will produce grapes which we can use to produce AOC wine so all-in-all about a 5 year lead in time!
Before we plant our new parcels we’ll get plenty of practice as we have about 1500 individual missing vines which need to be replaced – plants which have for one reason or another died over time. Normally this would be done every year or 2 but we’ve inherited a big back-log. We’re currently busy preparing the soil and finding people to help us plant at the end of April – not a job for the faint hearted!!
Finally, we’re raising the height of the trellising and adding a fixed top wire in our Syrah and Braucol parcels to increase the canopy height and improve our vertical shoot positioning whilst of course making sure not to cast too much shade onto the fruiting zone (I said this was for the geeks).
We’re really looking forward to getting stuck into these projects and will let you know how it all goes. Fingers, toes, everything crossed for great growing conditions this year.