Pruning time

The winter season is traditionally dedicated to the pruning of the vine, it is in fact necessary that the vegetative phase of the vine has not yet begun while pruning.

The types of pruning vary based on the style that the producer deems most useful and effective for each type of vine .

In Villa Calcinaia, the spurred cordon has been converted to Guyot in recent years, and the ancient farming typical of the Chianti area, known as Alberello di Lamole, is also present on one third of the hectares in production.

Guyot is a training system   which requires leaving a shoot each year to be laid down and  tied on the main  wire of the trelliss system and a so-called “recall spur” that is crucial to produce the shoot which will be laid down on the wire the following year. The productive branch  is replaced every year by the new one that was taken from the “recall spur”.

The Guyot allows a continuous renewal of the plant, in this way the vineyard remains active and productive longer, as well as making the quantity of grapes produced more easily adjustable.

The alberello training system,  traditionally used for centuries in the Chianti Classico area,  is also adopted in Villa Calcinaia and has very different characteristics than the Guyot or the spurred cordon.

The main difference lays in the occupation of the space: resembling a real tree and developing vertically, it does not require special structural trellissing, although it remains essential to gather the vegetation around a pole to expose the grapes and help their ripening.

In this type of training system the vines are  kept very low because it is of fundamental importance to exploit the thermal gradient of the soil to favor the ideal ripening of the grapes by exploiting the heat radiated by the soil . This phenomenon is particularly enhanced at Villa Calcinaia due to the refraction of the limestone rocks of which this estate is rich.

According to the organic approach of the estate all the wood produced from the winter pruning  is collected to form  a high quality compost which is then used to improve the texture of the soil in the vineyards  by making the organic substances present in it more accessible to the vines .