Legend has it that a former winemaker, rather negligent, once let his donkey graze in his vineyards and eat some branches of his vines. He would have observed that the vines grazed by the donkey had produced more beautiful and better-quality grapes than usual, so he had the idea of repeating the operation himself, and thus vine pruning was invented

Nowadays, we cannot entrust this delicate operation to this friendly mammal, as the dimensioning of the vineyard is, in fact, a meticulous technical operation, of extreme importance that serves to regularize and perpetuate the production of the vineyard. It also allows it to increase the quality of wines by significantly reducing the number of bunches and concentrating all the virtues in the juice of the remaining grapes.

All current knowledge about pruning goes through theoretical training, of course, but also and above all through the support of the “elders”, those who have already pruned the vines enough to know what they are talking about.

Pruning takes place from December to March. It is a race against time as pruning must be completed before spring bud breakout. Young vines, the most fragile vines and plots exposed to the risk of spring frosts are pruned at the end of winter, when the sap begins to rise.

At Quinta da Raza, pruning has two objectives, preparing next year’s pruning and preparing the next harvest.

In preparation for next year’s pruning, the objective is to anticipate the choice of fruiting branches and for this reason some 1-year-old young wood stalks are left. Their shoots will provide the new fruiting branches that will allow the pruner next year to carve the vine according to the type of pruning intended.

The second objective is to prepare the next harvest. The branches of the year that grew on wood from the previous year are the most fruitful, our pruners therefore choose them as priority.

They are also attentive to the appearance of the wood that they are going to maintain, the diameter, the absence of diseases, the spacing between buds, etc. Young vines and weaker old vines will be pruned shorter in order to favour vigour and future rooting and not the vintage of the year.

Vine pruning is therefore and without a doubt an important moment, but also a permanent learning experience…