19 March, 2001

Exam in the vine is close


Little mand on the wide open spaces of the vineyards. The binding seems never-ending when you watch it from the street. When I work myself, I move forwards nice and quietly and even think of it as quite pleasant.

My course in pruning the vines is moving towards the end. Now I know the date and time for the final test. I am more or less able to cope with the techniques, and this weekend I have been out to work a bit more on the binding. What I need now is mainly to work faster and to improve the quality of my decisions.

I think I have been rather hard-working on using the possibilities, I have had to train myself. This last sunday morning I once again went to vineyards of my mother-in-law to practise the binding of vines pruned the Chablis-way. I was fine. It is almost nice to roll your way through the rows to the accompaniment of the birds and in the bright sunlight of spring.

But even I now put suncream on my chins before work, I am still well dressed. Several layers of wool under the coat, protection trousers, gloves and bonnet and woolen soles in my wellingtons. The wind is still very cold.

Alone on the sea of vines
Seen from the outside, from the roads, from the paths between the vineyards the pruning and the binding seem rather overwhelming. All on your own in a mighty landscape of vine. And even some of the plots are rather small, the plants still grow rather close to each other, so you must work your way through a lot of kilometres before you are done. Many bring a radio, but right now with the birds sing so intensely that I prefer to hear the great song of nature rather than anything else. But then... it is not me who have spend months in the vineyards first pruning and now binding.

As I sit on my little bench on its strong wheels - the camionnette - I do not experience the same kind of infinity as I see from below when I do not work. My focus is on the plant I currently work with and to some extent on its neighbour as well, but never further than that.

It is a small and simple world. The string, I use, consists of a thin metal thread surrounded by paper. Its place is a little box in the back of my vehicle. The vine is in front of me, my tools in my lap. I carefully wind the string a couple of times around the branch I want to bind. I place the two ends of the thread inside the hook of my lieuse and carefully pull to the right.

My movement- when it is succesful anyway - leaves a tight winding, that will help the vine to keep straight up, when it later during growth will have more to carry. Two bindings per branch are normally fine. One for the charpente and another one for the prolongement. I take off with my legs and roll on upwards to the next plant.


I put the branches in the correct position, then bind them with a loop of string, and finally wind the loop into a tight binding with my tool.

Now and then I have to force the branches - as much as it can be done - into the correct position. One branch may continue on one side of an iron post and on to the other and thus cannot be tightened completely. You may also try to bend a branch in order to avoid superposition - the strictly forbidden phenomenon where the buds of two fertile branches may disturb one another. And then you finally sometimes experience that the old charpente that carries the fertile branch is not long enough to reach the thread. In this case you try to bind it to something else. Anything else really.

None of the branches break, so my manipulation cannot have been that hard. And then Annie has chosen good, strong wood, I suppose, when she pruned months ago.

Last big task
The binding is the last really big manual task, before the growth begins. Which will not be long now, as the tears - les pleurs - little by little have begun to flow here as well as in Avenay val d'Or. The sap is rising, and that means life is coming back. The buds have also begun to change appearance into a more wollen look.

When they start growing for real, and the first sight of the folded leaves can be caught, it becomes a slightly more difficult task to bind without destroying anything. I suppose it is quite likely that this may be the case during the exam in Bisseul right below Avenay val d'Or, where we already last week saw the first tears.


The liese consists of a hook and a pair of scissors..

Not pruned is the exception
Most places, I have passed in the Montagne de Reims and the Côte de Blancs during the last time, the workers in the vineyards have exchanged the scissors and wheelbarrow with lieuse and camionnette.

Only very few plots are still not pruned. You can postpone the period of growth about a week if you prune late. A trick that may be interesting if you own a plot with a particularly big risk of late frost. The other obvious possibility is that the owners are simply just late.

As cousin Nathalie, who kindly let me share both her experience and put my fingers in her cordons in the village of Rilly-la-Montagne in the Montagne de Reims. It is a way of pruning that I find less complicated than the Chablis. I begin to feel rather safe making my own decisions. Even as I prune the Meunier of Nathalie thinking I prefer not to be the one to diminish her harvest too much. I think less this way when I prune the Chardonnay of my mother-in-law since I know from the harvest days they always carry the necessary amount of grapes and even much more. A few mistakes in the pruning will not show on the yield, that is for sure.

The belongings of Nathalie are a good example of the spread ownership of plots here in Champagne. She owns plots in three different places: In Rilly-la-Montagne after her stepdad and two different places around the city of Dormans in the Vallée de la Marne after her grandmother and mother. Within the close family add the fields of her husband placed in the Côte de Blancs close to ours. This means that work in the vineyards means a lot of driving around as well.

Facts of the test
So far I have learned:

  • To prune vines according to the Chablis- and Cordon de Royat-methods.

  • To attach.

  • The reglementation for the AOC (appellation d'origine controlé) of champagne.

  • To do the written monkey test almost to perfection...

    I still worry about the practical test. I am fine when I can work on my own. It is worse when someone is watching, and definitely worst when somebody is timing me.

    I also need to learn theory to the equivalent of 10 A4 pages by heart. The mental block is that it is in French. I have decided to learn one page by heart every day until the test.

    My exam is scheduled to exactly 10 days. Alains exam is the next day. Just the way I would have chosen to order it if I could. I will not have to experience him all relaxed because it is over while I am one bundle of nerves still waiting.

    But it will be hard for my pregnant stomach to get up early the next morning after the last thursday in the schoolvine. My pregnancy has made it more and more difficult for me to see what I need to because I cannot bend my body in the necessary way anymore. And after a couple of hours on top of my upside-down bucket I need to spend at least the same amount of time stretchted out in bed. So I am really looking forward to see the end of this.

    Everybody urges me to do the test - come on, you are enlisted - maybe you can make it, even in French. Both Danes and French seem curiously united in this stand.

    På dansk

    Copyright: The copyright for text and photos at bobler.blogspot.com belongs to Solveig Tange. You may use my articles, photos or parts of them for non-commercial use and if I am credited as the author. Feel free to link to this site but not in your own frameset please.

  • No comments: