Liquid Bliss (lik’wid blis)

I think that every wine lover has secretly dreamed of owning a little vineyard somewhere. Every now and again I find myself day dreaming about tending rows of vines at sunrise and lovingly picking grapes by hand at harvest.  While the fantasy is a lovely one, the reality of vineyard work tends to be much less bucolic. In fact, growing grapes is back-breaking work that demands a tremendous amount of skill and knowledge. On a recent trip to Napa I got to experience a taste of this for myself as I took part in a hands-on pruning demonstration at the historic  To Kalon vineyard with Matt Ashby, director of vineyard operations at Robert Mondavi Winery.

The cycle of the grape growing season really begins in the winter with the cutting away of old growth to make room for the new. According to Matt, pruning “determines how much fruit we will have, how much vegetative growth we will have, how balanced these two factors will be to each other and ultimately the wine quality.” In most vineyards, pruning is left to the most experienced workers and for this reason is the single largest cost in the vineyard. I found it interesting that the same workers are requested to work the same vines year after year. In doing so, they get to know the vineyard in a more intimate way.  To give you an idea of how prized the skills of a good pruner are, there is even a pruning contest held each year by the Napa Valley Grape Growers Association. The bottom line? There is an art and an intuition to knowing what to keep and what to prune away that only a truly skilled worker will understand.  

Knowing all this, I was more than a little intimidated to start actually cutting.  While the constant bending down is tough, once I got the hang of the heavy duty pruning shears I could see that there was something meditative about the act of choosing what to cut and what to allow to grow into a shoot.  As you move from vine to vine, your mind clears until it is just you and the vine in front of you. Just as in pruning a bonsai tree, pruning a grapevine becomes a meditation in motion.  Matt, who also practices yoga, agreed. “You achieve a focus and a rhythm in this repetitive motion.  There is a smell, a sound, a feel to it that draws all your senses to the task.”  When Matt is having a stressful day, the kind that is too filled with paperwork and meetings, he heads straight to the vineyard to clear his mind.  “I can feel the wind or sun or rain on my face and hear the birds and see the beauty of the landscape when I am outside. The daily stress of life and work fade away when I am in the vineyard.” This love of nature is obvious when Matt talks about his relationship to the land which is “based on stewardship. I want to work in harmony with nature, not fighting it or supressing nature.”  As we continued down the vines, the sun on our backs, I was struck by the fact that this type of work can teach us so much. To work with nature instead of against it and to learn what to keep and what to let fall away.

All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on.
– Havelock Ellis

Would you like to learn more about sustainability at Mondavi? Check out their website for more info. Would you like to see what pruning looks like in action? Check out this video for a demonstration.