Winter pruning is crucial in order to assure the well-being of vines, increase their lifespan, and ensure that they be in the best possible state to withstand the rigours of a new cycle and harvest. It is effected manually while the plants are in a dormant and inactive phase.
Our different parcels of Verdeja – Menade’s centenary strain of Verdejo – need special and individual treatment depending on the soils in which they grow, together with their age and condition.
In the case, for example, of our oldest vineyards, attention must be paid to lunar cycles, as these coincide with the movement of sap within the plant along similar lines to the way the tides behave in our oceans.
What this means, therefore, explains Marco, is that if pruning is undertaken while the moon is either new or in ascent that as plant sap is rising this favours optimum vegetative development and is consequently a most propitious time to prune vineyards that grow on soils that are poor in nutrients.
When the moon is on the wane, however, plant sap retreats so this is when it’s best to prune plants that could do with healthier and more abundant fruit as well as more vigorous shoots.
Another important aspect of pruning old vines is exactly where one cuts; and ideally this should be at the internode (the slender part between two joints or nodes from which new shoots emerge) in order to avoid disease; and if the incision is large ‘the wound must be sealed and healed’.
Marco attends to this by applying his own customized mixture – composed of water, iron sulphate, together with a proportion of (50 grammes a litre each) citric acid and wettable sulphur, and this allays the possibility of problems that are endemic to our region, most seriously tinder (aka Apoplexy Parasite).
The fundamental principles of pruning are the same – be it a question of bush vines or those trained on wires or pergolas; and what determines the specific procedures applied essentially boils down to the nature of the soil, the grape variety, and the age of the vines all within the context of the type of wine that one ultimately seeks to produce.
