2 February, 2022
Pruning – I like it. It starts well, I cut straight away without marking and going over it with Thomas. But then there is a stretch where Thomas isn’t sure whether I didn’t cut off too much or wrongly. So let’s go back to the old model: I mark the branch that should remain, from post to post, and Thomas then checks. He checks and… I marked everything correctly, now and then he would have decided differently, but only because he is a semi-experienced winemaker! After lunch, Noëmi and I drive home – I have to take care of my business in Berlin and Noëmi has other things to do as well. Erica and Thomas continue pruning until 5 p.m. I wake up again at night: the middle three fingers of my hand are tingling and numb – just like the first night after pruning. Thomas is very familiar with the phenomenon. In the evening, our guest Michel Autran, a winemaker friend of Thomas’s, had calculated that he had to use the pruning shears more than 12,000 times in his vineyard, which I don’t think is much larger than Thomas’s, around 3.5 hectares.
Barbecue with Erica, Noëmi and Thomas, using the funny little wheelbarrow which is usually used for burning wood from the vineyard
Barbecue with Erica, Noëmi and Thomas – Thomas’s yellow Renault Kangoo is an old mail van, by the way