Viticulture

Viticulture is the work of cultivating the vine and bringing the grapes through to a ripe harvest. It covers everything that happens in the field before the grapes ever become wine: how the vine is planted, pruned and trained, how it is cared for through the cycle of the year, and when you choose to harvest. In technical language it is also called viticulture, and the point is simple: the way the vine is grown matters at least as much for quality as the grape variety itself.

It is in the field that flavour is laid down. Through the year the vine moves from winter dormancy through budbreak and flowering to véraison, where the grapes gather sugar and aroma and at the same time lose acidity. Flowering is the most vulnerable period, when frost, hail and rain can hit the entire harvest. By pruning and limiting the yield, the grower can concentrate the flavour into fewer grapes, and the timing of the harvest decides the balance: an earlier harvest gives more acidity for white wine, a later harvest more colour and tannin for red wine.

You cannot taste viticulture directly, but you sense it in a wine's freshness, ripeness and depth. A widespread misunderstanding is that good wine is solely about grape variety or terroir. In practice it is skilled work in the field, often in combination with organic farming, that lets the character of the place come into its own in the glass.