Pruning Lone Wolf Vineyard
On the hottest day of the winter, two weeks ago, we drove almost two hours to the southeast of Los Angeles, to do something that had never been done before. Well, almost never.
In 90-degree January heat we joined about twenty other volunteers to prune vines that had not been pruned since they were established, likely 80 to 100 years ago.
The vineyard is known as Lone Wolf. Many, but not all, of the vines had been lightly pruned the previous year for the very first time. The vines were essentially wild… or re-wilded.
And they were doing just fine without us.
Don’t think of this as a normal vineyard with rows. This looks more like a briar patch – a tangle of disorderly branches lying close to the ground. The entire jumble is below waist, or even knee, height.
And as we kneeled in the sandy soil to make the first pruning cut some of these vines had ever felt, it became clear that grapevines are, actually, not grapevines. At least not the way we usually think of them.
When left to survive on their own, the vines grow laterally along the ground. They even occasionally go underground and re-emerge, and they put down roots in these spots. So an original “mother” vine may expand outward in all directions, connecting to the earth again and again, claiming new resources, creating a network of inter-connected vines that are actually one vine.
They are surprisingly fertile as well. As they create their expanding vine network, the grapes that they produce – often lying directly on the soil – sow themselves and produce new vines that begin to create their own expanding networks. Every “vine cluster” – as we had to begin referring to them – had several “baby” vines around them – each a new variety, due to the genetic variability of its seeds.
As we carefully made our way through this vineyard, it was easy to see that this isn’t a collection of individual grapevines. This entire vineyard is one big super-organism.
It’s important to note what should be obvious as well: this vineyard has never been fertilized nor sprayed with any kind of pesticide, and it is thriving – growing, expanding, reproducing.
Of course it isn’t doing this with any human ends in mind. It doesn’t care if good wine can be made from its grapes. The vineyard’s end is health and survival. To do this it networks, stays connected, diversifies.
As we pruned, it was hard not to ask if we were actually doing harm. To achieve our ends – a unique wine – we stopped many of these super-organism survival techniques from continuing. And the winemakers will begin removing the babies from the super-organism, preventing further reproductive diversity from happening.
It was hard not to be extremely careful… even reverent of the place where we were imposing our will.
In the microcosm of Lone Wolf, these global tensions – human vs nature – are much more obvious. We cannot help but be human. But it seems that we would benefit from having our human-ness be informed by thoughtful respect of the super-organism of which we are part.
As the organizer of this pruning expedition, Abe Schoener, said, “…To make a good cut, we must think not only about this year; we must imagine 5 years from now. In order to make a cut worthy of these 100-year-old vines, we must imagine a time when we might long be gone.”