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.
