San Leonardo’s Blog

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.

In search of eternal youth. 

Marco Simonit and Pierpaolo Sirch – together with their 8-strong team – have perfected a method of pruning that is geared towards making sure that the vines reach a ripe old age, which entails keeping them healthy for at least fifty years. Their method – which involves pruning the young parts of the trunk – affords myriad advantages: 

- first and foremost, it prevents the onset of the trunk diseases that, like a pandemic, are laying waste to vineyards

- it marks the return of an approach to vineyard management that had been partially abandoned and that ascribes high value to older vines, as encapsulated by the ancient rural proverb “la vite vecchia fa buon vino” (“the old vine makes good wine”); we would like to add that it can also help the viticulture of the future

- it can reduce the management costs by an average of 30% (and even up to 50% in relation to certain aspects)

- it helps to keep alive the art of the pruner, whose skills are at risk of being lost.

Simonit & Sirch has recently undertaken an initiative of immense importance, which will see the company collaborate with two of Italy’s leading universities in order to analyse the effects of its method on the vines, both in physiological and pathological terms. Two internationally renowned professors have made their way to Corno di Rosazzo, where Simonit & Sirch is based: Professor Laura Mugnai, lecturer on the vine pathology course at the University of Florence (part of the degree course on viticulture and oenology) and, since 2002, president and founder member of the International Council of Grape Wine Trunk Diseases, which benefits from the input of researchers from 22 wine-producing countries; and Professor Attilio Scienza, lecturer in viticulture and oenology at the University of Milan. Together with Marco Simonit and Pierpaolo Sirch, the professors will conduct a long-term research project – the first and currently the only one of its kind in Italy – on vineyards located in five of the most important wine-growing regions of Italy: Friuli Venezia Giulia, Franciacorta, Piedmont, Tuscany and Sicily. Laura Mugnai will deal with the pathological aspects, whereas Attilio Scienza will focus on the physiological side. The work of the two Friulian agronomists will provide growers with concrete responses to a problem that is having dramatic consequences: the spread of vine diseases such as esca disease and eutypiosis. 

The Friuli region has played a crucial role in the re-birth of Italian winemaking, which began in earnest at the end of the 1960s. It was here that vine nurseries first came into being (25% of the world’s rooted cuttings are Friulian), and now Simonit & Sirch are bestowing the secret of eternal youth on our future vineyards.

Today sees the start of an important new chapter in the history of the vineyards of the San Leonardo estate, because the lessons in pruning from “grape preparation experts Marco Simonit and Pierpaolo Sirch”, masters of the pruning and restoration of old vineyards, begin this very day. 

It should be stressed that it is not as if, up until now, we have been unable to manage our vineyards; rather, the fact is that over recent years we have realised that our vineyards have, alas, been assailed by esca disease, the scourge that is slowly but surely decimating the more “elderly” vines – i.e. those with the greatest experience, so to speak, which are of course those that contribute decisively to imbuing our wines with such character and texture.

As soon as we became aware – ten years ago now – of the onset of this terrible disease, we started to look around for a solution, which we had hoped would come via our French nursery experts. After various attempts, which produced little in the way of tangible results, we returned to Italy – to the Friuli region, to be precise – where we met Marco and Pierpaolo through Professor Attilio Scienza, the great exponent of Italy’s winemaking culture.

Their approach to vineyard management fascinated us, and so we immediately visited some of the vineyards that have been managed over the past decade using their technique. There, we found many responses to the questions we had been asking ourselves.

After a couple of visits to our estate and a discussion with the people who take care of our vineyards,

Here’s Marco Simonit together with our team, after having dissected a number of diseased vines.

we decided to open this new chapter, and so, from today onwards, we are starting the theory and practice lessons in the vineyard, and we hope that, within three years, we will have succeeded in stemming the tide of this scourge by making the vines more robust. The implementation of this new method of pruning is aimed not only at ensuring the longevity of the vineyard but also at guaranteeing that it produces grapes more effectively.

But this is not all that’s new: we thought that you, too, would be interested in what’s going on in our vineyards, so we have asked the two pruning instructors to tell you – in their own words – about the extraordinary restoration project we are undertaking together. As such, we will be opening a new section of this blog to let our two friends have their say.

We very much hope that these posts, dedicated exclusively to the progress being made in the vineyard, will be of interest to you. We are convinced that, if you stay up to date on our activities through this blog, you will want to savour the perfumes of the soil and the seasons, as well, of course, as some great wine.