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Good morning, to those who celebrate.

Welcome newcomers, many of you from Canada—happy to have you!

Not long after my last post, where I announced I have the chance this year to farm Riesling and try to make some wine, I had the great fortune to spend a full day in the vineyards learning how to do winter pruning with the team at Egon Müller (in the Saar district of the Mosel wine region, Germany), arguably one of the best Riesling winemakers in the world.

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It was an incredible opportunity not only because I got to learn from the best, but also because I have not studied viticulture or oenology, so this practical education has been a massive time saver. Many thanks to Nina Basset NIH and Romané Basset for making it possible.

After a full day in the Wiltinger Braune Kupp vineyard with the team, I learned how to do “single Guyot” pruning, a method made famous by a man named Dr. Jules Guyot, who is the subject of part deux of this pruning mini-series (the post was getting a bit long so I’m breaking it down).

For part one today I will give some context about winter pruning and why it’s important, what single Guyot is, and why you would use it. It’s a little drier than the usual story time, but this background will help illustrate how seemingly simple decisions winemakers must make are often multifaceted and lay the foundation for understanding Dr. Jules Guyot’s contribution to winemaking. On a personal level, I hope this intro will enrich your next winery visit.

Part deux will be the story of the man behind the method: Dr. Jules Guyot. Who was he? Was he an actual doctor or one of those PhD “docteurs”? How did he get into pruning? And… why do we care? Stay tuned.

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What is pruning and why is it important?

Pruning is not only the secret to the Olsen twins’ photogenicity, but also a critical practice for controlling yields and growing quality grapes.

Why do we care about quality grapes?

If you have ever read an interview with a winemaker talking about how their wine practically makes itself in the cellar because the wine was “made in the vineyard”, it’s because while you can use a lot of tricks in the cellar to try to compensate, no amount of wizardry will make good wine from crappy grapes. Like my accounting professor used to say, “Garbage in, garbage out.”

The first step towards quality grapes is made by how you train your vines. This is done over time during annual winter pruning because pruning while the vine is dormant minimizes damage and disease risk. (BTW there is also summer pruning but that is a topic for another day.) Winter pruning helps grow quality grapes by:

• Controlling the structure and shape of the vine;

• Managing yield (focusing the vine’s energy on developing and ripening fewer, better grapes);

• Reducing risk of disease (pruning wounds also have a chance to heal without a lot of sap loss, less chance of infection while fungal spores and other nasties are not as prevalent);

• Increasing canopy and grape cluster exposure to sunlight and air circulation (optimizing health/reducing risk of fungal disease during the growing season, ripening, color development and flavor concentration).

Finally, winter pruning is important because it sets up the vine not only for the coming growing season, but also the one after.

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What is single Guyot?

Single Guyot is one among many methods of vine training. (Which method you use and why is a decision that takes into consideration a lot of different factors, which I’ll address further down.) It is a cane-pruning method that can be found all over the world where vertical trellising systems are used (chances are this is what you imagine when you think of a vineyard), but it is closely associated with cool climates and Burgundy in particular.

The method is named after one Dr. Jules Guyot, the 19th-century French physician, agronomist, and viticulturist who popularized it.

Career sidebar for the ladies: Key word is *popularized*. Dr. Guyot did not single-handedly invent the Guyot method, other people contributed to its development, BUT he refined and published the method. It’s all about visibility!

In short, single Guyot looks like this:

There’s a long, fruiting cane (right side) with 8 or so buds which will develop shoots and fruit for this year’s harvest—that’s the primary cane.

There’s also a renewal spur (that nubby thing on the left) with two to three buds that will provide options for next year’s fruiting cane.

In the below diagram, you can see the before (left) and after (right). This is highly simplified to show the logic of where to cut (black slashes), but not all vines will present such obvious scenarios.

The high-level process is to:

1. Select a primary cane (dark green in the above diagram): It should be healthy, well-ripened, and from the previous year’s fruiting cane (brown in above diagram).

2. Prune: Cut down the selected cane to between 8 to 12 buds. How many you leave depends on vineyard conditions, variety, and desired yield. These buds will grow grape-bearing shoots.

3. Train: Tie down the cane to the trellis. The cane can be trained either along the trellis wire, or arched over a higher wire and then back down to a lower one (see reel below). I arched mine and pointed the tip downhill to discourage the vine from putting energy toward the tip (which is its nature) and to redirect it to other parts of the vine.

4. Cut a renewal spur: Cut another cane located below the primary, closer to the trunk, into a short renewal spur with two buds. This renewal spur will provide new growth for the following season and help maintain vine balance and productivity over time.

In the above diagrams, the primary and reserve are trained neatly to alternate sides. In reality, things do not always present so clearly, especially in my situation taking over vines that have been trained differently (and inconsistently) to maximize yield. In this reel, I select renewal spurs on the same cane as the primary.

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Why use Single Guyot?

There are a number of vine training methods a winegrower could employ. Aside from single Guyot some other widely-used ones are cordon (associated with warmer regions), head (AKA goblet or bush, you might see this for old vine Zinfandel), basket (for windy places like Santorini for Assyrtiko).

Single Guyot in general is used to balance vine growth and fruit production, improve grape quality, and simplify vineyard management. Sounds great! Everyone should use it then, right?

No! It’s not just a matter of whether those outcomes are what a winegrower wants (and some of those benefits are not exclusive to Guyot, either) there are some very practical considerations when it comes to deciding whether to use single Guyot over another method. Some of these factors include:

• Vineyard goals;

• Site-specific conditions;

• Climate;

• Variety;

• Trellis system;

• Availability of human/capital/financial resources for winter pruning and vineyard management throughout the growing season.

Single Guyot is a popular method among winemakers looking to make high-quality wines because it selects the most suitable cane to produce fruit, regulates vine vigor, controls crop yield and shoot density, which in turn promotes optimal fruit ripening, flavor development and all around grape quality. But, because it also produces fewer grapes, it also means there is less wine to sell. So, in terms of goals, you should be aiming to make high-quality wines that can justify a higher price if you want to stay in business.

As for the other factors, single Guyot is well adapted for:

• Moderate to fertile soils;

• Various climates (although preferred in Mediterranean or continental);

• Varieties with balanced vigor and moderate/high fruitfulness;

• Vertical shoot positioning;

• Less resource-intensive than other methods.

There are instances even under the same conditions where another training method would be more appropriate. For example, you are growing grapes to sell off to a third party such as a co-op either because you don’t want to make wine yourself or you don’t have the capital to do so. Or you have a day job and are growing grapes for funsies (this apparently seems to be a thing here in Luxembourg).

In this circumstance, your financial and reputational incentives to invest in growing fewer, high-quality grapes are low (this is doubly true if your vineyard is planted with a lower commercially valued variety like Auxerrois or Elbling) and therefore your objectives would be to hit the minimum quality threshold set by the buyer and then optimize for maximum quantity.

In this case, all other factors being equal, you would pick a training method that aligns with those goals, perhaps double Guyot, which has two fruiting canes and in principal would produce twice as much as single Guyot vines. (Presuming the vines are planted at an appropriate distance from each other and you have the resources to maintain the canopies in a cost-effective way, among other factors… but you get the point.)

Since my goal for my yet-to-be-nicknamed, Mosel-adjacent vineyard (or well, the three rows I’ve selected to work) is to make the boujeeest garage wine possible, I went for single Guyot. It’s no guarantee that my wine won’t be terrible or make you blind (which, I’m really hoping won’t be the case… for either)—but hey, I am taking things one step at a time and concentrating on the things I can control.

You can follow my progress on my Instagram reels and stories (saved in highlights “Riesling 2024”) @third_place_wine.

Coming up next is the story about Dr. Jules Guyot! Until then.

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