It’s high season for pruning vines in Switzerland, the job grape growers say determines whether or not they will have the best possible grapes. The quality of future wines is at stake. I spent a chilly afternoon last week with Isabella and Stéphane Kellenberger of Vin d’Oeuvre winery, above their village of Leuk-Stadt in Valais, learning to prune vines.
I am a pruning wimp. I had the idea that I might ruin some of their Pinot Noir by chopping too little or too much. The electric clippers are way too efficient for my taste; if they can zip through an old chunk of wood, imagine what they can do to a finger.
For armchair pruners like me, start by learning the body parts, at a safe distance.
Unpruned: work to do, with a chilly but spectacular view down the Rhone valley to Sion 
At least one too many here, so we have to choose 
The choice is complicated if you took over the winery from someone else – it takes a few years to re-prune to meet your needs 
Tough to keep this one low enough to work properly later in the season 
Stéphane is firm: one old bit too many, so it has to go, right at the bottom, to ensure low yields
Most vines cultivated in Switzerland are trained or trellised. The trunk, which is the sturdiest bit, supports the vegetative bits (shoots, leaves, flowers, grapes). The top of the trunk is called the head. Its height is determined early in the vine’s life, by pruning. Key factors for deciding this are keeping disease and unwanted creatures at bay and ease of labour for vine workers. The first line of the wire is roughly where the head is for the widely used single cordon spur training system.
Going out from the head we have arms (forget about shoulders, although we use the term when we describe grapebunches), “short branches from which canes and/or spurs originate”. And we’ll stop there for now because the growers out in the vineyards this month are mainly pruning down to the arms where they don’t want growth and keeping a small part of the spurs where they want the sap to flow. When the sap rises through the trunk and moves along the underside of the canes, and weeps from these cuts in a few weeks, the vines will be preparing for new spring growth.
First you study the vine 
Then you determine where the sap flows 
You can more or less calculate the age of the vine by the previous cuts 
Fresh and clean, we can expect good growth 
The cuttings are left on the ground, to be worked into the soil (every other row) in the spring 
We’re aiming for 3 spurs per arm, not above the level of the lowest or base wire 
That looks pretty clean now! 
Oh dear, quite a lot left to do below us 
Steep slopes add to the challenge 
Oh dear, more pruning above us 
Look closely and you’ll see some nice cutting 
And the beat goes on…
[…] Winespeak: vine body parts for an educational tour of the Kellenbergers’ vines at pruning […]