Learning to Prune

This week we visited Shotley Vineyard in Suffolk to learn from their experience in pruning vines. Pruning is a technical and essential skill in a vineyard. The whole future of your vines is affected by how you prune as every cut you make can alter the way your vine will grow. Although we will not need to prune our vines for a while, it is still useful to understand how vines develop as well as get clued up on how to look after them when we need to!

How do you prune a vine?

When pruning the general idea is to leave a ‘fruiting cane’ and a ‘spur’.

The fruiting cane is the stem of the vine which will (hopefully) produce the fruit for the year and is tied down to a horizontal wire before Spring. It is cut to about 10 buds long, in other words, count 10 buds up the cane and cut.

The spur is a much shorter cane, in fact only 2-3 buds long, but acts as a spare if the fruiting cane fails.

The difficulty comes in choosing which will be the spur and fruiting cane. Usually an un-pruned vine has many twigs coming out of it so it takes skill to select and cut the right ones. The idea is to pick a fruiting cane and spur below the lowest wire on the trellis system and not to far from the crown (the big knot of wood at the top of the trunk), as this is the powerhouse of the vine and the grapes. They should be about pencil thickness and allow for good ‘sap flow’- in other words, stay close to the crown so that the vine doesn’t have to work too hard to get nutrients to the buds and eventually the grapes.

In the end, a big tangle of twigs leaves a neat and tidy Y-shaped structure with just 2-4 twigs (depending on if the vine is single-sided [single-Guyot] or double-sided [double-Guyot]). The vine is now ready to enter the spring season with a slimmed down, more efficient structure where the sap and nutrients will flow straight to where it needs to be, rather than into many different twigs and canes.

Our thanks go to Shotley Vineyard for kindly teaching us this essential skill! As farmers we continue to learn the new practice of viticulture every day and it is fascinating!

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