Meticulous winter pruning of the long, twisting arms of head trained, own-rooted Zinfandel first planted during the 1920s in Lodi’s Clements Hills appellation.
Winter is coming
Winter, you can say, is the “quiet time” of year in wine regions around the world. Yet there is a lot going on. Not just in the wineries, where cellar hands are busy topping off barrels and getting white wines and rosés resting in tanks or wood ready for bottling. But also in the vineyards, in amongst the plants that are bereft of leaves, seemingly in the midst of a cold and continuously rain-soaked hibernation.
Consider the fact that, depending on plant spacing, there are somewhere from 900 to 1,200 grapevines per acre in most California wine regions. In Lodi, there are over 100,000 acres of planted wine grapes. This means there are over 90 million grapevines that need to be pruned during the course of each winter. If it sounds like a daunting task, it is!
Winter pruning of trellised grapevines in Lodi’s Mokelumne River AVA.
It is true that there are now machines that can help with the yearly pruning. But these machines primarily do what is called “pre-pruning,” the cutting off of canes to 6-to-12-inch lengths. After the machines pass through, pruners still need to walk through the vineyards and manually attend to each and every vine; selecting the wood to take off or leave on each plant, making a decision of how many and which buds to
