Summer is a-comin’ in

Loud sing cuckoo!

(Anon)

All you happy gardeners have come back over and over and over again to look at my article about Pruning Grape Vines which I posted in January. If you cannot remember it, however, here is the link. (http://blog.amandaswines.co.uk/blog/_archives/2008/1/30/3495865.html.)

The May bank holiday is over. A bit of a wash-out this year, really. All this rain is very good for the plants, though. You just have to be a little careful of the “mildiou” which appears when the weather is warm and wet. So far, so good, though.

At this moment, we are way past the pruning stage, so I decided to do a follow-up article to the next stage so you can see how the care for the vines progresses.

First thing you need to do after the pruning is to pull off all the dead wood from the vine and make nice little bunches of faggots. They burn very well for winter fires and are very useful for barbecues in the summer.

The vines which have been pruned following the “Guillot” (Guyot) system have one long branch. This branch needs to be lowered onto the bottom wire, so that the spring shoots can sprout upwards. There are 3 wires on a grape vine. One at the same level as the top of the vine stem and 2 above which are used to entrap the vines as they get thick and heavy.

(I took a photo of this earlier this month. This gives you an idea as to how the vines are looking at the moment.)

Although the long branch is quite bendy, it is better to lower it when the temperature no longer freezes and the Spring night frosts are out of the way otherwise the young shoots are susceptible to being frozen or easily knocked off.

If possible, the lowering of the branch should be done after the “Saints de Glace” on or around the 15th May. The 3 days of the “ice saints” are always a lot colder than the other days. (No one puts their window boxes out until after these dates.)

Most of the professional wine growers lower the branch beforehand due to the timescale. Once the warm weather starts the vegetation grows very, very fast.

Lowering the branch is backbreaking. Occupational hazard!

When this has been done and duly clipped onto the bottom wire, the little shoots need to be removed from the base of the plant. When they are very young they come off very easily. In fact, they can just be brushed off. These are called “les gourmands”.

Then, the vegetation starts to grow very, very fast.

The vines start to get heavy.

The two upper wires are placed on the ground until the vines have grown enough to put them back up again thereby entrapping the vines between the wires.

Some grape varieties grow a lot faster than others. The Chardonnay varietal is easily the fastest, followed by the Gamay, the Cabernet Franc, the Côt and the Cabernet Sauvignon varietals - the Touraine reds; then lastly the Sauvignon Blanc. You can click on these links to see the wines.

In France, all this care for the vines is still done by hand!

So remember, drink wine (in moderation), drink quality wine, drink Amanda's Wines!

When icicles hang by the wall,

And Dick the shepherd blows his nail…

(Shakespeare)

I have been living in the heart of the Loire Valley for over 12 years and these cold, crisp mornings always remind me of those poems I had to learn as a kid in the early 1960’s. They all come back to me. I wonder if kids today still have to learn them by heart.

If “Dick, the shepherd” had still been around he would have been blowing his nail, too. It was the week before Christmas.  It was minus 11° celsius! This is very good for the vines, however. It freezes all the little bugs in the wood of the vines and enables the plant to carry forth without hindrance of pests during the budding season. Jean-Marc always tells me that we need at least minus 8° celsius for 3 consecutive days in winter for a good grounding for the spring buds.

The pruning of the vines is the work which most growers hate. It is invariably cold, grey, dull, snowing or raining and, above all, tedious.

Every single vine has to be pruned - by hand!

It lasts from late November to the end of March. The growers do little other than prune during these months.

Most of them take a CD or radio into the vines so they can listen to their favourite programmes or music.

I have tried to get the viticulture associations to make a CD for the growers to learn enough English while pruning to be able to communicate the splendours of their Loire Valley wines to passing tourists. My pleas have fallen on deaf ears so far.

In our region, or “appellation” (Touraine), there are two different ways of pruning depending on the type of grape and the required abundance of the harvest - the “goblet” style and the “Guillot” (Guyot) style.

The goblet style is cut quite short. The branches are pruned close to the stump. Each branch is about 2 inches in length, with about 2 eyes. This type of pruning is for the young, vital vines which have an excess of zeal in the spring budding season. This is typically used for the gamay and côt (malbec) varietals.

Guillot/Guyot pruning is used for the more subdued, older and less abundant vines, such as the sauvignon blanc or cabernet varietals. The Guillot pruning is very short apart from one (or, in some cases, two) very long branch. The long branch has about 7 eyes. Later in spring this branch is lowered and clipped onto a wire.

In either case, there must be no more than 10 eyes in total left on the vine.

Jean-Marc has made himself a « prune-mobile ».

This is a small vehicle in which he sits. He manoevers it sideways down the vines. It is covered on the top and there are flaps on the ends so he is out of the way of intemperate weather!

However, that’s another story...

To see the next stage, please go to our next article about Lowering the Branch written on 31st May 2008.

I shall continue to keep you updated with the life of a wine-grower in France.

Remember, drink wine (in moderation) – drink quality wines – drink amandaswines!