HISTORY
Marco Simonit and Pierpaolo Sirch, Preparatori d'Uva
The old pruners of the farming world knew how to preserve a plant’s health. They would, with care and dedication, stop in front of each vine, and would study it carefully and then carry out soft pruning, in the way of small focused operations, plant per plant, without the anxiety of the plant’s being used immediately, with the far-thinking of being able to preserve the health and the slow and balanced development of their small vine plant.
This same philosophy guides the hands of two Friulian specialists, vinedressers Marco Simonit and Pierpaolo Sirch. They have recovered an ancient method and after 20 years of experimentation have begun applying it to the demands of modern viticulture, that is of more intensive training systems, for example espalier, Guyot or spurred cordon. They come from Friuli, an area which is highly active as far as the growth in quality of Italian wine is concerned, beginning with the development of modern nursery farming, which has allowed healthy and selected vines to be created. The message of safeguarding ancient autochthonous vine clones also began in Friuli, thanks to the Nonino family’s Risit d’aur Award: back in 1975.
This new method has recently been introduced to about forty important Italian wineries, where Simonit and Sirch have transferred the knowledge they acquired through experimentation started at the end of the 80s.
A new pruning philosophy
Simonit and Sirch together with their team –made up of a total of 8 people – have defined a pruning method which preserves the vines state of health, lengthening its life cycle and productivity to at least 50 years, and so doubling the current average age expectancy.
The method consists of continually pruning the young wood using a slow and focused approach. The initial advantage consists in preventing diseases in the wood, which like a pandemic have been compromising vineyards. As well as this, a vine management philosophy, which had been somewhat abandoned is also being recovered giving value to old vines and increasing the value of their yields. Management costs are reduced as, by applying preventative medicine criteria to the vines, they allow the plant to grow and age well. Finally an ancient trade has also been recovered, that of the pruner, which had risked being lost. Today in fact, laborers working in Italian vineyards are mainly foreign and often improvised, made up of willing people who are generally without any previous experience. Besides this, the requirements of modern viticulture have affirmed the role of mechanization processes in the vineyard alongside the needs of intensive production.
However, from the two Friulian technicians’ twenty-year period of experimentation, carried out from 1988, the secret of vine longevity emerged, which depends on a correct pruning, which does not provoke injury to the plant’s vital parts. The bush-trained cultivation system, for example, which is typical of the Mediterranean area, is particularly long-living thanks to pruning carried out mainly on young wood. “With a cut carried out on young wood, the wound heals well, enabling the plant to resist disease better and preserving the its health – Marco Simonit specifies – as opposed to a cut on old wood, on a plant of 3 or more years of age, which leaves a wound which can compromise the vasculature of the plant thus favoring a more probable entry of fungus responsible for wood diseases. The major difficulty of our research has been to transfer the old cutting techniques to modern viticulture, in particular that represented by the more intensive espalier planting systems, such as guyot or spurred cordon”.
Their project has become even larger with long-term experimentation divided over five important Italian wine producing zones: Friuli Venezia Giulia, Franciacorta, Piedmont, Tuscany and Sicily. Within this scientific undertaking they are flanked by two internationally recognized university professors: Attilio Scienza, Full professor of viticulture and head of the viticulture and oenology degree course at the University of Milan and Laura Mugnai, Full professor at the University of Florence in the viticulture and oenology degree course, specialized in vine pathologies, and, since 2002, chairman and founder member of the ’International Council of grape wine trunk diseases, to which researchers from 22 countries from the wine world are part. Attilio Scienza will follow the physiological part of the experimentation, whilst Laura Mugnai will follow the pathological part.
Professor Attilio Scienza (Department of Vegetable Production University of Milan) writes “Safeguarding the integrity and vitality of old vineyards is important not only for the quality of the wine they produce or for the landscape-cultural interest, as they represent an important reserve of biodiversity”.