Once vintage is all over and the vines drop their leaves for the winters dormant (rest!) period, unfortunately this doesn’t sound the 5 month grape grower holiday to the warm beaches of Bali or somewhere else warm like the Caribbean, instead this is a time when the first major step is taken with the next vintage in mind.
John Pruning Shiraz at our vineyard at Koonunga.
The repetitive and sometimes tedious task of pruning is a crucial for setting up the vines for the best chance of producing grapes that will turn out the type of wine you would be happy taking to any get together, dinner, party or relative bash!
At the time of writing this we are literally two days from finishing the 3 month pruning season, it is now September 18th 2011, and the vines buds are bursting out, ready to grow and produce the fruit for the (with mother nature on our side!) excellent Barossa Valley 2012 vintage.
This is an exciting time of year as a grape grower, another cold Barossa Valley winter has come to an end, the rubber boots and rain-gear won’t be needed as often, the sun is warming us up and increasing our vitamin intake! And we will be able to put our damn squeaky electric snips back in the cupboard for another 8-9 months!!
So why is pruning such an important part of the grape growing calendar anyway I hear you ask!? If you care that is, you’re probably just can’t wait to crack open another bottle of red, pour it in your favourite riedel wine glass, and sip it back in the comfort of your ultra-comfy lounge chair while watching your respective football/sporting codes grand final!
clean and vertical! The main objective of our pruning is to have a two bud spur pointing as straight up vertical as possible, care is taken to ensure all the cuts are made very clean, we want to avoid having extra buds around the base of the spur. Extra buds will force growth and extra fruit where we don’t want it. The better the position of the spur and the buds will lead to better spaced out fruit, more even airflow and sunlight to the bunches, the end result will be a better balanced wine with more colour and most importantly the desired flavours, tannins and aromatics!
Well pruning is a bit like giving the vines a haircut, a major haircut; it seems like a very simple job at first glance yet can be one of the hardest jobs to teach people to do right!
My old man John has just finished pruning his 55th season here in the Barossa Valley, my Mum her 42nd, and my 15th, if my calculator tells me correctly that’s 112 years of pruning, at an estimated 350-400 vines per day, 60-70 days of pruning/year, that equals (and we’ll take the high side of the numbers to make ourselves look tougher)= 112years x 70days x 400vines = 3,136,000 vines… So you can see by now when we do the job we want to make sure it is done right, while speed is good, vine shape, clean cuts with our snips, and the right amount of wood we leave on the vine is an absolute must!
We use this machine(barrel pruner) to remove and mulch up the excess vine canes, not only does this help provide the vines with mulch but it removes the bulk of the sticks making it safer and faster for the hand pruning to follow.
Lon way to go! Once the barrel pruner has removed the excess canes the meticulous task of hand pruning the vines individually takes place .
While we prune as much as our time allows, it is not possible to prune all our vineyards, this is where we call in the contracting pruning gangs to help out, getting them to prune to our specs isn’t always easy, but with some careful instruction (most of these guys have had plenty of experience though-in a couple cases they have taught us ways to increase our pruning speed by 10-15%!) and an occasional “sorry guys you have to go over your work again and get it right this time!”, request, they do a job that will go a long way to helping us get the quality desired in a Barossa Valley Red.
Time to have a Red!
Here’s to opening a nice bottle of Shiraz and throwing the hats in the air to celebrate another long seasons pruning finished, on with the next job!!
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