Vintner's Art How Great Wines Are Made

The Vine From the historical perspective to likely attitudes and practices of the twenty-first centuryWine from the woodsThe grape vine in its wild state is a climber. Its natural home is the forest. Hence its botanical name ofVitis vinifera silvestris-- the woodland wine-bearing vine.Which woods did it originally inhabit? A vast stretch, in all probability, from western Europe to western Asia. Where was it first used to make wild wine? Noone knows. But archaeology can point out the place where it was first cultivated. The scientific evidence (like the Book of Genesis) points to the foothills of the Caucasus. Georgia has produced the earliest evidence of vine selection and hence the emergence of the cultivated variety:Vitis vinifera sativa.Carbon-dating puts this change to domestication at about 5,000 Be. Mankind was therefore still in his Stone Age when he first cultivated the vine -- and presumably made wine.To understand how the grapevine grows, and how it responds to cultivation, one has to remember that it is a climber, and that in its wild state it grows in a tight tangle with other plants and trees, competing with some, supported by others. Competition is for light, for soil moisture and nutrients. To reach the light the vine climbed higher. To survive in soils full of competing roots it built up a degree of tolerance to drought. The support came from the trees it climbed. These responses to the environment determine how the vine's performance can be manipulated in the vineyard.What the vine needsEuropean wine-growers have long known (and New World growers more recently) that vines react to sunlight, not only in spring but throughout the growing season -- even in winter. Sunlight on the woody parts, especially the new shoots or canes, means a more fruitful vine. At the base of each leaf is a bud -- the crop potential of the following year's vintage. The amount of sunlight on the vine when its new buds are forming acts as a signal, determining whether the buds become leafy shoots or embryo flowers for fruit. Thus the yield of each plant is initially dependent on the amount of light reaching the vine up to 15 months earlier -- April to June in the northern hemisphere, October to December in the southern hemisphere. In this knowledge the grower will manipulate the vine to achieve an appropriate balance between the production of leaves and fruit, above all avoiding a dense canopy of leaves which shade the 'bud-wood'.Pruning: 'vegetable editing'Unquestionably the annual growth cycle of the vine stirs deep emotions in most wine-growers, and pruning has traditionally been regarded as an art-form of fundamental importance to grape and wine quality. Every possible means of vine training has been tried through the centuries. Close-planting and hard-pruning of vines, almost in the modern manner, to produce small hedge-like rows was introduced by the Egyptians between 4,000 and 5,000 years ago. When the focus of viticulture and winemaking changed from Egypt to Greece, the practice of pruning to increase the vine's fruitfulness and quality became standard.The Romans, who learned their wine-growing from the Greeks and the Carthaginians, knew and practised most of the 'modern' pruning and training methods: the 'goblet'; cane-pruning, now credited to the 19th-century French researcher Professor Guyot; fan pruning; low bush training; high trellising, and so on. In the great vineyards of France this task is entrusted only to pruners who have been employed on the estate for decades, and who know every vine as an individual, every nuance of site andterroiras a fact of life.The brutalist schoolIs such attention lavished on each vine justifiable? In recent years Australian academics felt it was not. They proposed that a vineyard should be viewed as a modern commercial orchard: each row being treated asJohnson, Hugh is the author of 'Vintner's Art How Great Wines Are Made', published 1992 under ISBN 9780671728885 and ISBN 0671728881.