New Vintage Beginnings

Like the art of origami, winter pruning in the vineyard is a long, laborious practice: each snip of the secateurs as deliberate and precise as a paper fold, each cut as dedicated as the next to the creation of an amazing three-dimensional sculpture of a perfectly manicured vine.

After midwinter, when the Maltese weather turns colder, grape growers are to manually trim back last year’s woody canes making sure to pay careful attention to the equilibrium and harmony of each knobby vine foot.

Pruning signals the beginning of the new 2016 vintage. The retained wood is re-positioned to balance the plants’ vigour and allow for new fruiting canes to grow in a suitable manner conducive to yielding this year’s quality grape crop.

Like most aspects of farming and winemaking, this wood-clipping act is a combination of philosophy, past experience as well as facts and science. Fully aware of the importance of winter vine pruning, the Delicata winery goes to great lengths to transfer such crucial skills and knowledge. In fact, last week the winery’s experts organised several workshops in Malta and Gozo for the grape growers that tend the vineyards making up the Delicata domaine.

About 150 vignerons attended the interactive sessions which form part of Malta’s most awarded winery’s ongoing sustainable viticultural programme. The main topics focused on effective modern cane and spur pruning techniques. Standard methods have been optimised and specifically tailored for each grape grower taking into consideration, among other things, the particular grape variety grown, sunlight exposure, soil composition, age and micro-climate of each vineyard as well as its potential I.G.T. or D.O.K appellation. Apart from workshop sessions, the Delicata winery also offers consultancy and since recently the services of a crew of highly trained hands to assist grape growers on-site.

With nearly one million vines to prune, Maltese and Gozitan farmers will start the hard work without further ado and prune on until the end of February or early March. All this time, weather conditions will be closely monitored by Delicata’s viticulturists as to avoid pruning immediately after rainfall when increased numbers of fungal spores risk infecting vines’ pruning wounds.

“The sharing of expertise and comprehensive pruning assistance by our fourth generation family winery has proven to be vital and recompensing”, award-winning winemaker Matthew Delicata commented. “Whilst there’s always more to learn and implement, I’m pleased to say that Delicata’s partaking vignerons have come a long way. By applying the recommended pruning systems they are reaping healthy benefits for the vines and their own financial bottom line”.

The Delicata winery is strongly encouraging other interested grape farmers to join Delicata’s fruitful viticultural programme. In today’s highly competitive global wine market, sustainable viticulture is critical for success. Pruning and other vineyard quality management procedures save costs and, most importantly, yield better quality grapes for Delicata’s Maltese quality wines which are amassing award after award on the international scene.

This article by Georges Meekers appeared first in the Times of Malta, 15 January 2016.