Vineyard 31: Still more to do but it’s looking well

In December 2014 I attended a viticulture course called winter pruning. I wrote about it at the time and about the actual pruning that followed. Unfortunately for my commitment to learning more about all things viticultural, the funding for the Wineskills course have been withdrawn by DEFRA, I think. And this was just at the time when people running the courses – Plumpton College in Devon and probably the most prestigious institution in the UK, for one – had realised there was a growing demand from an increasing number of wine makers in Yorkshire and hence the willingness to run the courses actually in Yorkshire. Well, the accessibility of these courses – winter pruning being just one, was short-lived. In fact I don’t think there are any such courses for us relative beginners anywhere in the country now. Another victim of the cuts. Anyway, the point of me telling you about this is that no courses means less inclination to return from the courses and put into practice the skills we learned. By this time last year, prompted by the course, we had finished our winter pruning well over a month ago. This year we have only just finished (in fact still a few vines to do) our pruning. I hope I am right in believing that I once heard that you could either prune early, as we did last year, or late as we have this year. I seem to recall that there were advantages and disadvantages to both. Early pruning bringing on the buds that much earlier and hence making them more susceptible to late frosts, which is exactly what happened to us last year.

Whereas our pruning technique last year was a thing of beauty, this year’s attempts have been a lot less fastidious. Last year we counted the stems and calculated how many buds to leave after pruning and whether we wanted single or double guyot – i.e. stems  going one way or two ways, depending on the strength of the vine. This year we went for the ‘that looks about right’ philosophy of pruning. I did ask one of my more professional vine growing / wine making chums how pruning this year would differ from last year (i.e. third year and fourth year growth), he reckoned it was pretty much the same, so it’s all been a bit casual. What effect this will have on our yield will only become clearer in a few month’s time. Except we have committed the cardinal sin of those engaging in any kind of experimentation, which we constantly tell ourselves is what we are doing. It’s an experimental vineyard we tell people, code for it probably won’t be successful. The cardinal sin being we have changed two variables at the same time in that we have also properly fertilised the vines this year and didn’t  last year. If we do have more success this year (not difficult) we won’t know what had the effect, maybe both.

What is different with this year’s pruning is that we have netted a small area of the vineyard to, you will remember, keep the bloody birds from eating the grapes. Thank God, we didn’t net any greater area because what we didn’t predict was how difficult it is to prune those vines under the netting. I had to send in the shortest member of the pruning team aka Mrs Summerhouse to get under the netting. OK, we (that’s me) didn’t really put up the netting with any great professionalism, as usual we did it on the cheap with odd bits of wood I bought cheaply (there’s that word again) from local timber merchants. If we hadn’t paid two hundred pounds for the netting I’d be tempted to take it off and throw it away, but this is Yorkshire after all and we don’t easily throw things away. It’ll come in, is a favourite phrase. But, that said, the netting is a pain and it would seem no more effective at keeping off the birdies than good old Olive our tame owl. Olive has taken a battering in the gales and she’s currently resting, headless and ‘springless’ (the spring makes her head wobble realistically) but we believe she will recover in time for the new season. I’m pretty sure that, later this year, as the grapes begin, hopefully, to develop, I will buy Olive 2 or 3 more chums and go down that line of a bird scaring strategy. But I’m getting ahead of myself, there’s a long way to go before I need to worry about grapes, there’s budding, bud set, de-budding, leaf spraying etc. etc. next in line.

The other slightly tedious task we’ve been engaged in is pruning and tying up the willows that are our designated, and cheap, windbreak. The only problem with them is that, unprotected, they are eaten round the base and hence die by the bloody rabbits (wildlife is a wonderful feature of the vineyard) so we have to keep the little buggers off by putting tubes on them. The problem then is that the tube massively increases the surface area acted on by the wind and so they lean over at ridiculous and ultimately unhelpful angles. In other words our windbreaks are flattened by the wind (I think I may have mentioned it is a powerful beast this far up the dale), there’s a certain irony in this. So I’ve been tying the tubes to the stock fence. It certainly doesn’t look elegant and it remains to be seen whether it keeps our windbreaks roughly vertical.

Finally, I have decided to treat myself to a grippler. What do you mean you’ve never heard of a grippler? Let me explain. Nothing looks worse in a vineyard, even in our fairly untidy version, than slack wires (the ones that support the vines). Ours are looking a bit untidy and one or two have popped out of their staples altogether. So they need replacing and tightening and I reckon gripples are the way to go. All I have to do is find a place that sells them. So far I’ve had the kind of blank look you probably assumed when I mentioned them. The search for the grippler will very probably form the topic for my next vineyard blog. So all will become clear. Eeh by gum the things you do when you’re retired.

PS. When we had finished our various vineyard chores we noticed a strange thing, we were warm. We glanced at the sky and there was this bright object. Yes, you’ve guessed it, it was the sun. We decided rather than shooting off home we would sit a spell on one of our benches and admire the dale. At the beginning of this blog is one of the photos I took as we sat there counting our blessings.