sitting around chatting after dinner (everyone's to hungry to talk
while eating!), we talk vines. "I had a crappy row today. Musta been
a new pruner – ended up with a coupla bays o' mostly
two-/three-caners, even some one-caners." We debate the merits of
spur- vs. cane-pruning, discuss the current worker shortage and
compare going contract rates. We'll compare notes on the thickness of
trunks or canes, talk about time-saving pruning and wrapping
techniques, wonder if soil chemistry or wine label demand determined
the split between 3- and 4-cane vine sections of the same varietal.
We talk about seeing rows of vines in our sleep, dreaming of pruning,
vine stripping and wrapping. A Swedish girl from another hostel told
me one of her roommates trims invisible canes in her sleep. At the
Royal the other day, I saw Paul looking at a decorative plant that I'd
been staring at earlier. "Are you thinking what I was thinking?" I
asked. "Needs to be pruned, doesn't it?" Paul smiled, "Yeah. None
of us will ever look at a glass of wine the same."
Photo: Pruned vines (left) and pruned and wrapped vines (right)
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