Pruning
Stephen Doyle
The beginning is the end
Sometimes the days are crystal clear gems with light winds and bearable temperatures. Other times, freezing SW gales crystallize ice on your beard, make tissue paper protection of your driza-bone and fairly cut you in half with ease. The quicks of your thumbs and fingers will gradually crack wide open and weep your own sap in concert with each new pruning cut. As the season wearys itself towards its end, your dry, scratched hands will become claws and your wrists stiffen and ache with over use. But it is vital to remember that you hold in your painful hands the future of the wine you want to create; leave too many buds in the wrong positions and the vine will wilt under the pressure to produce. It will become despondent and this ill thrift and overcropping will lead to a vinous liquid more or less divorced from the variety it should reflect. Chop out too many buds and the vine will tend triffid..a sad, shaded vegetative mess prone to disease and greenness through the profile of the fruit. In the vineyard, as in life, it is balance which matters. But whatever the conditions, sometime between May and October, we need to find around four months of good enough weather to hand prune each of our twenty-one thousand, two hundred and seventy-four vines in a manner which will result in quality wine. That's why pruning in a SW gale is sometimes necessary at Bloodwood.