19/06/2023
« On prunung - Part 2 of 3 »
When in 2020 Chanterêves became a full fledged domaine of 4,9ha - with 4,5ha planted, we had neither manpower nor time to prune twice. In the Hautes Côtes parcels, we even asked a friend to come with his tractor at the end November to cut off the branch tips mechanically so that manually eliminating the branches after pruning will go swiftly. So much for not compacting the soil…. We are yet far from being ideally equipped and for certain mechanical work like mulching the grass in Hautes Côtes, we still have contractors come to get it done.
One of my first hopes, after Guillaume joined me full time in spring 2022, was to go back to the old pruning practice, and also to prune only during the descending moon. (Farming in tune with the lunar calendar, by the way, isn’t a discovery of Biodynamics but a very ancient one.).
This year, the spring came slowly. We scrapped the mechanical pre-pruning in Hautes Côtes. We checked the long term weather pattern to decide how much we could prune in 2 steps. In the end, out of 4,5ha, we pruned 1ha - 2 parcels of Aligoté of Hautes Côtes which are our latest ripening vines - in one go but the rest we did it in 2 steps, and almost only during the desirable moon phases. Except one Friday afternoon on the 7th of April it was a lunar node and I had forgotten it. We were giving the final cut in Hautes Côtes de Beaune blanc « Les Monts de Fussey » and it hailed. The buds hadn't broken yet but were bulging, and the hail chipped away something like one bud per cane.