Pruning is chilly, although we shouldn’t complain, our maritime climate is milder than most. We don’t prune in snow, or harsh frost at worst squalls from the Southern Ocean blow across Bass Strait cold and fierce. We wrap ourselves in “Dry-as-a-Bone” jack and scarves just to remind ourselves that pruning is a winter job. It is also a time of renewal. Pruning is all about removing last years wood and replacing it with new wood. Vines produce fruit from the canes which grew the previous year and these are the canes we select to carry this years crop.

The 3 Acre Vineyard is all cane pruned. Last year we cut away the old permanent arms which had grown old and tired and replaced the old spur pruned cordons with single canes. I like the neatness of cane pruning as well as it’s flexibility. It is more work but it allows us to do things we couldn’t do with spur pruning. In the harvest of 2014 we cane cut the Sangiovese to allow some of the fruit to sun dry on the vine, a modified “Amorone” which added an extra dimension to the wine. Experimentation is one of the advantages of a small “hands-on” operation like ours we can play around with ideas, and ideas make wine, especially when they are focussed on achieving the most from our three pampered acres.