Pruning Season

After a whirlwind January we are now very much back to business as usual! The vineyard team are busy in the vineyard for the pruning season which is well underway, with our Stonehouse vineyards almost finished. We have a few additions to the team this year in the form of a flock of friendly Suffolk sheep. Working in partnership with a local sheep farmer, his flock are grazing our vineyards during the winter to keep the grass cropped. This is a win wine (typo intended) situation with well fed sheep providing some natural fertilisation for the vineyards. This is the first year we have trialled sheep in the vineyard over winter and the flock will need to move on to new pastures green at bud burst having made a great contribution during their stay.

Pruning our 80,000 vines is one of the most labour intensive and important jobs in the vineyard. This work will keep us busy until the end of March at least and consists of three processes.

• Firstly the skilled job of selecting the fruit bearing cane for the 2023 season and making the important cuts. A poor decision here can leave us short of fruit as some canes and buds are more fruitful than others. 
• Secondly, the less skilled (but equally time consuming and very vigorous) job of pulling out the dead wood left over from last year which is entangled in the foliage wires on the trellis. If you want a good winter work out then this is the job to do. This pruning wood is placed in the vine rows and mulched up by the vineyard mower during the first grass cutting of the year with the benefit of returning organic matter to the soil which is important for healthy soils and healthy vines.
• Finally we have to tie down the 2023 fruiting cane to the fruiting wire. This has to be done carefully and without breaking the cane and we leave this job until mid March, when the sap is starting to rise, so the canes are more flexible and less likely to break... job done and all set for the new season.

For the vast majority of our vines, we use the single guyot pruning system. This means that we train one cane from the previous season horizontally along a trellis wire called the fruiting wire. The buds on this cane will produce the fruit bearing shoots for 2023.

Meanwhile, in the winery Jeremy is busy preparing for the bottling of our 2022 still wines next month. We've been tasting from the tanks and are really excited about the potential of these wines! Keep an eye out for updates on the next month's bottling!