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.

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