How To Tame A Grapevine
Looking at how the world's most valuable vines grow, and how they're trained
Give me a grapevine and I’ll make it teas and tinctures, seal its pruning wounds, respect its sap flow, attest to its every nutritional need. Give me a houseplant (or indeed any number of non fruit-bearing garden plants) and I’m the Angel of Death, though. I killed a cactus last week. My indoor palm is very, very sick. I’m pretty the folks in the local plant shop must think I’m living inside some sort of evergreen biodome, but I seem to be mostly producing very expensive compost.
The four methods authorised in Champagne
After some ill-informed hacking in garden two weeks ago it occurred to me that I could use some of the prunings to demonstrate some principles of vine training (with a focus on the four methods used in Champagne). There’s a beautiful elegance to how vines are grown. Experienced pruners can ‘read’ individual plants and make subtle adjustments to their technique as they go, clocking the vigour, spread as they picture the vine not only in the next growing season, but the ones that follow it.
The animations below are (slightly simplified) guides to the theory of each system. First, though, a 90 second intro to why we have to prune grapevines in the first place:
Champagne’s Four Systems - 1 minute videos
1. Cordon de Royat
First, let’s take a look at the Cordon de Royat, used for Pinot Noir. This is a spur-pruned system, which means that a permanent cordon is grown along the wire, and fruiting shoots are grown from spurs of 1 year-old wood that grow off that cordon.
2. Chablis Method
Next it is Chardonnay’s turn. Chablis pruning is one of the more confusing-looking systems out there….
The first time I saw it I couldn’t get a handle on it at all. What it does, though, is solve a problem: Chardonnay is low-yielding in cool climates with spur pruning, whilst long cane systems such as Guyot are not viewed very favourably in Champagne (although it’s hard to get an answer as to why; perhaps it’s something to do with uneven canopies? Or yield? When I asked Paul Girard-Bonnet in Le Mesnil whether he would take advantage of the new opening-up of regulations that meant Chardonnay there could be pruned another way, his response was dismissive. “There is a reason it is how it is….every time we change something in Champagne we always end up going back to how it was before.”
3. Vallée de la Marne
This method is adapted as much for place as it is for grape variety (Pinot Meunier). Both this and the Guyot system are a bit tougher when it comes to frost, which can be more damaging in the Marne Valley than in more elevated, dryer, well-drained slopes of Grand Cru territories.
4. Guyot
Guyot pruning is one of the more widespread pruning systems in the world, although it is regarded as a problem-solver rather than a high quality system in Champagne. Sometimes producers will prune young vines to Guyot before establishing a different system, or switch to it if they have issues with frost and yield.
And there we have it. No other system is allowed in Champagne. Actually…er, well, there’s VSL…Vignes Semi-Larges…but that’s a story for another day.
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