Field Notes - March 2024 in Virginia
March 2024
We all thought we’d have more time. Somehow this winter season seems to have passed by even faster than last. Punxsutawney Phil was right. It has been another early spring indeed. These last few years have pushed us to explore some different vineyard management strategies to help combat this new routine. One major difference is a process called double-pruning. It entails making two pruning passes through the vineyard. The first pass removes any undesired wood and cuts back all remaining canes to roughly a foot tall. Much longer than we will eventually need. Once the risk of any late season frost has passed, usually by late April, we go back through the vineyard for a final pruning pass to prepare the vines for a fruitful growing season. Leaving your fruiting canes much longer than you need can help prolong the budbreak process and mitigate the risk of late season frost.
The benefit of this extended pruning process lies in a nifty little evolutionary adaptation called Apical Dominance. In Layman’s terms, that means that the buds towards the end of the cane will open first, oftentimes much earlier than the buds at the base of the cane. This encourages the vine to devote all its energy up towards the sun and prevents any unnecessary lateral growth. One can imagine how this would be advantageous to a grapevine competing for space in a crowded forest understory.
Spring is such a volatile time of year and I always find it fascinating to observe how the world responds to it all. Daffodils, for example, are totally bullheaded. Frost be damned, once you see those little stems starting to poke up out of the ground, it’s only a short matter of time until you’re staring down patches of obstinate little yellow flowers lining every roadway. Grapevines tend to be a little groggy upon waking. They can, and often do, hit the snooze button for a few weeks if the weather appears to be trending in a cooler direction.
As a winegrower, I do my best to notice the way that these processes unfold naturally and try to organize them in such a way that accomplishes our goals as winemakers without disrupting the natural lives of the vines. It’s a balancing act and the observation is ongoing. There is wisdom in the way the world wakes up.