Winter At Crenshaw Cru: Chapter 2 - Pre-Pruning to Force Dormancy

Viticulture at Crenshaw Cru in South Los Angeles is influenced by the ocean, which is less than 7 miles away as the crow flies. And we have lots of crows… and parrots. The hills of Ladera Heights and Baldwin Hills funnel ocean breezes through our neighborhood, both cooling the wine garden in the summer and warming it in the winter. This microclimate is warm enough that our vinifera vines do not go fully dormant, even by the winter solstice.

However, some winter rest is good for our vines, both for them to have a natural break and also so that they can do the underground work that prepares them for health and vitality in the next growing season.

It is also ideal to get the old leaves off the vines as they can host an excess of fungal growth by the end of the year.

So in mid-December, we do a “long prune” of the vines and strip off the leaves. This “long prune” leaves 18-24 inch canes, but signals to the vine that its energies should turn downward and inward.

This first pruning cut of the season is far from the main trunk of the vine, so any infection that enters at the cut site is far away from hurting the main vine and will be cut off the vine when we make our second cut in the Spring right before bud break. This way we don’t have to use chemical inputs to protect our vines during pruning. And even though there are organic protectants that you can use at pruning (Vitiseal for example), we prefer to reduce our inputs (and therefore costs) as much as possible.

As we strip the leaves from the vines, we let them fall down and create a leaf compost on the vineyard floor. This leaf compost decomposes over the winter and feeds the vine in the following growing season.

This process of long-pruning and stripping leaves requires a lot of hand labor. It’s time and energy we’re happy to spend in Crenshaw Cru, but may not be scalable to very large vineyards without a lot of humans to help with the work.