Decided in the Cold

In the first week of January, in freezing fog, somebody walks down a row of vines with a pair of secateurs and decides how much wine there will be in September.

A vine left to itself produces far more fruit than it can ripen. It is a climbing plant whose strategy is to get seeds distributed, not to concentrate flavour. Pruning sets the number of buds, each bud produces shoots, each shoot carries bunches, and the arithmetic of the crop is therefore fixed in the cold, months before anything green appears.

Everything that happens afterwards adjusts a decision already taken. This is why pruning is the most skilled job on an estate, done by hand, one vine at a time, and why a good pruner is paid accordingly and booked a year ahead.

The system used almost everywhere in the Côte d'Or is Guyot: one cane of six to eight buds laid along the wire, plus a short spur that will provide next year's cane. It suits varieties whose buds near the base of the shoot are not very fruitful, which includes both pinot and chardonnay.

The plantings are extraordinarily dense by world standards: around ten thousand vines per hectare, roughly a metre apart in rows a metre apart. This forces the vines to compete, which restrains the vigour of each one, and it is why the tractors in Burgundy are built on stilts to straddle a row rather than driving between them.

Balance is the concept underneath all of it, and it runs in both directions, which is the part people get wrong.

Too many buds and the vine carries a crop it cannot ripen: the familiar failure. Too few buds on a vigorous young plant and the energy goes into shoots and lateral growth instead, producing a dense shaded canopy, poor fruit exposure and more disease pressure. So a grower may deliberately leave more buds on young vines to absorb the vigour, which looks like greed and is the opposite.

Which is also the argument about green harvesting. Dropping unripe bunches in July is standard practice at many estates, on the grounds that a vine carrying too much ripens none of it. The objection is that the vine compensates by enlarging the remaining berries, diluting exactly what you meant to concentrate, and that if the crop had been set correctly at pruning, none of it would be necessary. Most good growers now treat heavy green harvesting as evidence that something went wrong six months earlier.

The most significant change in pruning practice in a generation is about how the cuts are made rather than how many.

Simonit and Sirch's method, usually called soft or gentle pruning, argues that cutting back aggressively into old wood creates cones of desiccated tissue that obstruct the vine's sap flow and open it to trunk diseases. The alternative is to prune along the natural flow, leave a margin of dead wood between the cut and the living vessels, and keep the vine's architecture intelligible over decades.

The method is slower and requires more skill, and it has spread quickly through good estates. The reason is esca, a trunk disease that kills vines and has become markedly worse since sodium arsenite (the one effective treatment, and a severe carcinogen) was banned in 2001. With no chemical answer available, the response has had to be structural.

Finally, the phrase on the label that means nothing in law and something in practice.

Vieilles vignes has no legal definition anywhere in France, so a producer may apply it to thirty-year-old vines or to eighty-year-old ones as they please. What old vines reliably do is yield less and more consistently, with smaller berries and a higher ratio of skin to juice, and with less dramatic swings between vintages.

The folk explanation, that their roots go deeper and reach more interesting geology, is not well supported. Any mature vine has an extensive root system, and the relationship between depth and quality has never been demonstrated convincingly. The consistency and the lower yields are real and are enough to explain the reputation without invoking the rock.