San Leonardo’s Blog

Spring has now sprung even in the South Tyrol, and with the reawakening of the soil we’re getting ready to carry out the various maintenance tasks and improvement works – on the vineyards, the parkland and the vegetable garden – that form the routine for the San Leonardo staff during April and May each year.

As I’ve mentioned before, we had a great deal to do this winter to implement a new pruning system (the system devised by Simonit and Sirch, to be precise), which we wanted to roll out across all of the vineyards on our estate.

Patently, there are major differences between Guyot training, (simple or dual) spurred-cordon training and the so-called pergola trentina, but we have tried to adapt the new pruning technique to all of the training systems we use, with a view not only to endowing the vineyards with a longer life but also to achieving more standardised production and, above all, a more uniform maturation of the bunches – a factor that will be very important later on, during the fermentation and ageing of the wines.

We levelled off a 30-year-old vineyard that had become heavily infested with esca disease – the scourge that is destroying large numbers of Europe’s oldest vineyards – and then ploughed the plot in autumn. Here you can see it tilled and ready to be re-planted.

This winter, we had a lot of snow, which is a great thing for us farmers – indeed, we are wont to say, “hunger above the snow, bread below the snow”. This old saying, like all proverbs, actually encapsulates a grain of truth, because snow disinfects the soil, keeping it damp and preventing it from turning to ice deeper down. The truth of this proverb has become clear in spring, because the vineyards are more homogenous, and even the flowers are more opulent and uniform. Moreover, when spring comes a little late (as it has done this year), we can avoid the worries associated with the frost that can sometimes appear out of the blue in April.

I took a number of shots a few days ago of some dandelions, the yellow flowers that invade the vineyards – an invasion that to us signals the end of the long South Tyrolean winter and the revitalisation of the fields.

In upcoming posts, we’ll show you the development of the vineyards and the whole estate, and we’ll also look at the planting pattern that we have used for the new plot.

Those who know something about the old rural pruners will be aware that they followed an ancient ritual, which involved stopping in front of every vine, inspecting it carefully, initiating a silent dialogue with it and then intervening to meet its specific needs. Sadly, those master pruners are no more! The vineyards were mechanised to compensate for the lack of manpower. For many years, much of the work in the fields has been done by labourers from other countries – these people are ready and willing to work hard, but often have no experience in dealing with vines and do not speak the language that the pruners know so well. 

Pruning has become invasive, inflicting wounds on the vines that cannot be fully healed, thereby exposing them to trunk diseases. It was against this backdrop that Marco and Pierpaolo launched their laudable project. What was required was to apply the same criteria used for preventive medicine: ageing well affords a better quality of life and also allows enormous social savings to be made (in terms of treatment, medicine and hospitalisation costs). They understood that if the vine is to survive over the long term, it is crucial to intervene when it is still in its “infancy”. At all of the companies they work with in Italy, they run training courses on their pruning method, thus helping to re-evaluate and give dignity back to an ancient art. It’s no exaggeration to say that the future of the vine in the vineyard – and even the ultimate quality of the wine – depends on the skill of the pruner. 

Marco and Pierpaolo were responsible for conceiving and setting up the first courses on pruning in Italy. The first of these was held at the San Felice winery in Castelnuovo Berardenga, in the heart of the Chianti Classico zone. The second has just come to an end at the Faculty of Gastronomic Sciences in Pollenzo.

In short, Marco and Pierpaolo have leveraged the wisdom of the past and applied it to the present. Over time, a misguided approach to pruning can limit sap flow and undermine the effectiveness of the work being done, leading to irreparable damage – the quality of the untreated grape is compromised and the vine itself dies when still relatively young. This, in turn, increases the management costs. That’s why their approach is geared squarely towards preventing the onset of disease.