← Journal Pruning
Pruning is the only decision that matters
Every January Tomás walks 22,500 vines with a pair of secateurs and decides the vintage. Everything after that is damage limitation.
People imagine the decisions in wine happen at harvest, or in the cellar. They do not. The most important decision about the 2026 vintage was made last week, on The Ladder, in the rain, when I cut a cane off a Chenin vine and left the one next to it.
I prune all 4.1 hectares myself. It takes from the second week of January to the start of March, most years. It is about 22,500 vines, and each one gets somewhere between forty seconds and three minutes.
What a cut decides
A dormant vine is a tangle of last year’s growth. Pruning takes all of it away except one cane, or sometimes two, and a short spur as a spare. The buds on that cane are next year’s shoots, and next year’s shoots carry next year’s bunches.
So when I choose the cane and count the buds, I am choosing how much fruit the vine will try to ripen. Leave twelve buds on a Wallgrow Riesling and it will set more than thirty centimetres of soil can carry. Leave six and it will ripen every bunch properly. That is the 22 hectolitres a hectare we hold to — it is not a number we hit at harvest, it is a number I cut in January.
Why Coldfoot goes last
Coldfoot is the frost hollow at the bottom of the estate. A pruned vine starts pushing buds sooner than an unpruned one, and a bud that has pushed is a bud that a frost can kill. So I leave Coldfoot until the very end — the first week of March, some years the second — to buy it ten days’ delay on budburst.
In 2021 I pruned it in February, like everything else. The frost on the 14th of April took eighty per cent of the crop in one night. We made 8,600 bottles across the whole estate that year. I have pruned it last ever since.
What I think about
Mostly nothing. After the first week you stop thinking about each vine and start seeing the shape of it before you have made the first cut. The rows go quicker. The radio in the van plays to nobody.
The barn is four degrees in January, which is why the tasting room is closed until March. If you see a van parked at the bottom of Quarry Road in the rain, it is me.