Newsletter No 1, Jan 2002

Welcome to the first newsletter of our new Rentavine Club. Normally this part of the newsletter will be written by the vineyard manager. However, at the present time that is not possible because we do not have a vineyard manager, or rather we did not have one throughout January. Bryan, our previous manager left just before Christmas to resume his career in growing organic vegetables - 2 years at Sedlescombe growing vines was enough for him! Peter Scott our new vineyard manager, started on 4th February so he should be writing next month's newsletter. In the meantime you are stuck with me, so here goes.

We started work after the Christmas break (which we spent with our 2 boys skiing and messing around in the snow of the Black Forest in Germany, near to where my wife Irma's parents live) on 7th January. We came back to 'work-a-day-reality' faced with 13,000 vines needing hand pruning. I decided to start at our rented vineyard behind the famous Bodiam Castle. I had two helpers, neither of whom had ever pruned a vine in their life. That was about to change! They were about to get a lot of practice.

In 1994 I took over the management of the Bodiam Castle vineyard and immediately converted it to organic methods. In 1998/99 we converted the trellis system (i.e. the posts and wires which support the vines) to what we call the 'Sedlescombe Special' because as far as I know it does not exist anywhere else. In fact I recently faxed drawings of the system to a well known author on this subject Richard Smart who wants to include our system in his forthcoming book. The modification involved putting in a horizontal crosspiece onto each post and running out additional lengths of wire to enable supporting 3 fruiting canes on each vine rather than just the 2 allowed by the previous system.

Due to the dry weather (by day at least) during January - we only lost half a day to rain - our pruning team of Nick (a WWOOF volunteer) and Daniel (a young trainee vineyard worker) successfully pruned all the 6,000 vines at Bodiam by the end of the month. I spent 3 days at the beginning of the month teaching them the art, skill and techniques of grapevine pruning before retreating to the mounds of paperwork piling up in my nice warm office! I drove them to work each morning and kept a watchful eye on their work of the previous day by making a regular morning inspection and making a few encouraging suggestions to improve their technique such as 'cut the higher spurs shorter' or ' leave the fruiting canes longer' so that by the end of the month they could claim the status of 'fully qualified vine pruner'.

The purpose of pruning the vine is to reduce the number of bunches of grapes the plant will produce so as to achieve an optimum ratio of leaf to fruit, thereby attaining the highest quality of fruit consistent with reasonably high yields. If vines were left to produce all the bunches it could, then the fruit would be of such poor quality that we could not meet the minimum legal standard in terms of sugar content set by the EU and Wine Standards Board. In fact you would probably not get any grapes at all because they would be destroyed by mildew disease which would thrive in the dense foliage of an unpruned vine. Another reason vines require pruning is to maintain the shape of the plant. With an unpruned vine the new wood which carries the fruit would year after year get ever further away from the trunk, and the vine would encroach into the space allocated to the vines next to it, which in turn would again cause dense foliage, diseases and loss of crop. In other words, pruning represents an awful lot of work but without it there would be no usable grapes to harvest.

We pruned the vines at Bodiam by cutting about 80% of the wood off the plant. All we left were 3 strong healthy looking one year old fruiting canes which carry the buds from which the green shoots will grow during the summer and carry the fruit to produce the 2002 vintage. To maintain the shape of the vine in the years to come (i.e. to get new fruiting canes growing from the right place for use in 2003 and beyond) we cut a 2-bud 'spur' at the top of each vines trunk. The buds from this spur will produce strong canes from which we can select the fruiting canes for 2003. It will also produce a cane from which we can cut a 2-bud 'spur' to produce canes for 2004. In this way the system is self-perpetuating and we always get new growth to produce the fruiting canes from exactly where we want them - from the top of the trunk and not halfway down the vineyard entwined with another vine!

The prunings cut off the vines are left on the ground and get 'pulverised' into small pieces by a tractor-driven machine which simultaneously mows the grass in Spring. The small bits of wood then rot down to become humus - a plant food for the micro-organisms in the soil which indirectly help to provide nutrients for the vines. After pruning Bodiam Vineyard we still have 3 vineyards to prune at Sedlescombe in February and March. More about that next month.