Pruning en famille

So what do you do when you've got 7000 vines left to prune and not enough time to do it?  Well, Mum and Dad were looking for a bit of physical exercise after the Christmas celebrations and fed up with the snow in Ashby de la Zouch they didn't take much persuading to get on the plane, swap the snow for the sun, and come and give a very welcome hand at Domaine Jones.

Quick lesson in pruning

and off we go

And as they started snipping the long vine shoots I got on with clearing up the vineyard.   The bareness of the vineyard makes it easy to see and pick up the cuttings and bits of old vine but is was also very easy to see the damage that the torrential rain in October had done to the soil. Large gashes, that made me go ouch, cut across the vineyard exposing vine roots and layers of the black slate soils.  We stuck a superficial plaster on it by putting cuttings and stones in the trenches but a major stone wall building operation is needed to permanently sort out the problem.

Mother Jones making smoke signals

Five, six pick up sticks

My little vine bonfire

Prunes and Fagots

And finally the perfect day for pruning has arrived along with my friend Emma from London so no more excuses and it was time to get out there and get the job done.  Much to the amusement of Jean Marc I decided that this year I would like to bundle up the clippings and take them home as firewood.  This used to be a common occurrence in the village with the ladies tying up the vine shoots into perfectly proportioned bundles called fagots. The fagots were then used the following summer on the barbecue and would impart a particularly delicious flavour to the meat.  Once families had enough fagots the surplus would be sold to the baker in the village to be used for the bread oven.

Today the tradition of fagots had almost died out as tractors pulling shredders do the job much more efficiently.  Making the perfect fagot is quite a task and previously was the object of much pride as fagots would be stacked up in front of houses in full view of the neighbours.  Jean Marc said our fagots were 'pas mal' but more of a bouffanelle than a fagot.  This is the local word for a small fagot and I think that mine will be put in a discrete corner of the garden.