A Beginner's Guide to Vineyard Chores

I’ve not posted for a while. You probably didn't notice. But Juliet did. My former neighbour from years back, in touch about a different subject, casually asked “why did you stop blogging about the vineyard? I found it quite interesting”.

I haven’t stopped. It’s just that there’s not much to write about during the dormant season. In fact one of my previous dormant season posts (The waiting season) was about the fact there’s not much to do or write about in the dormant season.

Things are starting to happen now though. As the season progresses the jobs pile up. April to October is just a long list of chores. These, and the growth of the vines and ripening of the grapes, or the damage and disease of the vines and the shortage or non-ripening of the grapes, make for better copy than, well, Quiet Land being quiet land between the months of November and April.

Let’s talk about those chores. Some require skill, many need machinery, but several are basic, and boring. Repetitive, tedious, lonely (because they’re the work of one person), but depending on your state of mind they can also be rather meditative. You know, the zen of mindless repetitive tasks.

So, to Juliet and other occasional readers: in this post I’m going to treat you to a chronological run-down of vineyard tasks through the year, and give each a sort of Top Trumps ranking on the following variables:

-          Skilled or basic

-          Machinery or manual

-          Expensive or cheap

-          Physically difficult or easy

-          Big job or small job

-          Satisfying or tedious

-          Stressful or low stakes

-          Sociable or lonely

1.      Pruning and tying down (Skill 5, Machinery 2, Cost 4, Physical difficulty 4, Big job 5, Tedium 4, Stress 3, Sociability 3)

I wrote about pruning in my first dormant season. Now that was truly tedious, and definitely a big job. It was also very lonely and decidedly backbreaking. But first year pruning is not really pruning. It involves cutting all the vines down to two buds above the graft. An unskilled job. Pruning of a mature vine is a different matter. It requires skill – mine are pruned on the vertical shoot positioning (VSP) system with a single cane (“guyot”) facing upslope or downslope. Once pruned, each vine then needs its cane tied to the fruiting wire. That needs to happen 5,200 times in 2 fields.

Each vine takes an expert about 20 seconds and an amateur up to a minute. It’s a long, skilled, physically exhausting job that gives the pruner RSI in the hands and the ever-present risk of a severed finger. I get labour in to help out. Five seasoned vineyard workers manage in a day or two what it would take me weeks of vineyard trips to achieve.

2.      Dropping wires (Skill 1, Machinery 1, Cost 1, Physical 2, Big job 2, Tedium 3, Stress 1, Sociability 1)

I’ve not mentioned frost protection in this post, because I don’t do any. For vineyards that do, that’s thoroughly expensive and highly stressful. I just leave myself at the mercy of the elements and hope for the best.

But one rather less exciting job I do at this time of year is dropping the trellis wires down to near the ground, so that the vines can grow and then be tucked in tidily later (tucking in is roughly as quick and low-stress as dropping, with perhaps a soupcon more skill involved.) At the same time I fix any wires broken in the previous year by machinery. I have a few of those to do this month. Necessary, but unexciting jobs.

3.      Bud rubbing (Skill 2, Machinery 1, Cost 1, Physical 3, Big job 3, Tedium 4, Stress 2, Sociability 1)

Vines are supposed to grow up from their pruned cane at the fruiting wire level, but of course the pesky things try putting out shoots down at the base and up the trunk too, every spring. Leave these in place and you lose grown and vigour up at the top, and give yourself a breeding ground for disease. So one of the late spring jobs is to take off all the new shoots and buds on the lower trunk. A boring and lengthy task that gives you sore hands.

My genius idea this year is to see if the ubiquitous rabbits, who have undermined several of the vines with their warren openings, might do a lot of the job for me. I took the rabbit guards off this winter. Now that’s a miserable, long, tedious job but at least it only happens once. Now all that low level greenery should be an appetising meal for our floppy eared tenants. Tuck in rabbits!

4.      Tucking in: not the rabbits, the vines. With wires. As described above, it happens in early-mid summer. Nothing much more to say

5.      Spraying and mowing (Skill 3, Machinery 5, Cost 5, Physical 2, Big job 2, Tedium 1, Stress 2, Sociability 2)

This is the most frequent vineyard task during the summer months. After treating the under-vine weeds in early spring and mowing (I avoided having to mow so far this year thanks to Kevin’s sheep), the main spraying season kicks off in May and runs until a few weeks before harvest. To keep on top of fungal infections you’re talking a pass through the vineyard every fortnight or so.

I don’t have a tractor yet, so at great expense I get contractors in to do this for me. It’s skilled – driving in a straight line rather than knocking over the trellis posts being a particularly important skill – and happens quite quickly.

Spraying is absolutely vital. It doesn’t matter whether you’re organic or conventional, if you’re growing Vitis Vinifera and leave the vines alone for more than a few weeks, you will get fungal infections that wipe out or blight the crop. It’s not something winemakers like to talk about much, because it’s not a very pretty image, chemical potions (conventional) or toxic heavy metals (organic) sprinkled over those fluttering green leaves, every two weeks for a whole summer. When they say don't show how the sausage is made, this is the viticultural making of the sausage.

6.      Soil and petiole testing (Skill 5 – for the lab, Machinery 4, Cost 2, Physical 3, Big job 1, Tedium 1, Stress 4, Sociability 1)

Sometime each year around mid-July an annoying thing happens in part of the vineyard. At the top right corner of the Melon B field the vines start going a bit pallid. The earlier green flush turns yellowy and some of the older leaves begin to crinkle at the edges.

For the first two seasons I assumed this was downy mildew attack and blamed a lack of spraying before rain. But why was it mainly happening in that corner? Then I took a few photos and showed them to an AI app. “That’s not downy mildew” it said, with that recognisable LLM turn of phrase; “that’s nutrient deficiency”.

So I took some samples of soil in a few different places in the vineyard, and chopped off a few leaves for petiole analysis. Sure enough, the top corner came up deficient. And the soil, which I’d followed guidance and sampled in W shapes across the land first time round, proved to be completely different in that corner to everywhere else. Highly alkaline, not neutral. Lots of free lime. With Melon B planted on SO4 rootstocks that’s a recipe for disaster.

Taking soil and leaf samples is necessary, stressful, fairly quick (though knackering work if the soil is baked hard by summer drought), and probably an annual job from now on.

7.      Bunch counting and sugar testing (Skill 4 – for the lab, Machinery 3, Cost 2, Physical 1, Big job 1, Tedium 1, Stress 3, Sociability 1).

There are some other bitty jobs in the early autumn that are a bit like soil sampling. Around the time of veraison, when the bunches start to ripen, you potter around the vineyard counting how many bunches there are on each vine. You also lop off a few (this is mentally hard, I feel I'm depleting the crop) and send them off to the winery for weighing. Bunch weight x bunches per vine x number of vines gives you a vague clue how many tonnes of fruit you will be bringing in at harvest.

Last year the answer was not many. Small bunches x only a few per vine x 5,000 or so vines came to a couple of tonnes. In the end I brought in even less, because we ran out of time on harvest day.

The runs lab tests for sugar and acid too, but sugar testing is also a rather fun DIY job. There’s a little handheld optical device called a refractometer, which looks a bit like a cross between a microscope and a mini telescope. You take a berry, squirt some juice on the glass plate then look through the eyepiece. Inside, in an image like a blue and white kaleidoscope, a measure will tell you the specific gravity of the juice, or its “Brix”. Both are measures of sugar content. The higher the number, the closer you are to harvest.

This is fun, and addictive. It’s also prone to human bias, because you have to try hard not to pick the juiciest, ripest looking berries to sample.

8.      Putting up and taking down bird netting (Skill 3, Machinery 2, Cost 5, Physical 4, Big job 4, Tedium 5, Stress 4, Sociability 1)

I hate erecting bird netting. The reason for having it is itself a source of stress. Those bloody pheasants, released in their thousands out into the Autumn landscape just as the grapes ripen, making their way greedily through the vines and stripping them bare. The process of putting nets up is time-consuming, fiddly (you need to clip them carefully otherwise the pheasants will just jump up underneath them and take the grapes anyway) and altogether irritating. The nets themselves cost thousands: we’re talking kilometres of the stuff. And then at the last minute before harvest, with those birds watching on and licking their lips, you have to take the things down again and roll them up.

Birds. So annoying I wrote an entire blog post on them last year. My biggest faunal enemy on the site. The red deer up the hill are a danger to the canes and trunks but have kept away recently. The rabbits undermine the roots and trellising with their mazes of tunnels. Something big and fierce killed and ate one of Kevin’s sheep last year. But the birds are the worst. And the only socially acceptable control is the damned nets.

9.      Harvest (Skill 2, Machinery 2, Cost 1, Physical 4, Big job 4, Stress 3, Sociability 5)

Ah, this is what it’s all been for. The most – the only – truly sociable job on the vineyard is taking in the grapes at harvest time. It’s an enjoyable day out and people happily volunteer for a few hours with secateurs and baskets. If the sun shines it can be bucolic, moving along the vines chatting with friends in the next row. It’s also a day of high anxiety for the vigneron and rarely goes by without some sort of minor injury, typically secateur cuts, wasp stings or put-out backs. Best done with gloves. At least the relatively adult-scale height of trellising in England makes the task less backbreaking than in the ground hugging vineyards of Southern Europe.

Harvest is the most important date of the season, the most enjoyable, and it also marks the end of the year’s chores. You could lock up the vineyard after harvest and ignore it until February, and nothing amiss would happen. Once harvest is in all the action transfers to the winery, which for me means decisions but not labour, because I leave that in the professionals’ hands.

10.  Blogging (Skill 1, Machinery 4, Cost 2, Physical 1, Big job 2, Stress 3, Sociability 1 or 5, depending on how you define “social”)

Writing these blogs isn’t yet a chore. Hopefully it’ll never become one. Finding suitable photos to accompany them is always a headscratcher. But I plan on keeping them going as a regular vineyard task for a while yet.