Transforming a vine: open-air precision surgery

In our last post, we explained why the "Gobelet" shape had become economically untenable for working our soils without chemistry. The solution? Trellising.

But beware — you don't change the form of a 60-year-old plant with a snap of the fingers. It's titanic, risky, costly work. Here is how we proceed at Maison Bugnazet.

1. The (heavy) investment. First, set the stage. Literally. We drive stakes in, run wires to define strict rows. To give you a sense, restructuring 20 ares (2,000 m²) of our Moulin-à-Vent cost us more than €10,000 (uprooting, drains, fertilising, planting, trellising). It's expensive, but still less than uprooting and replanting entirely (around €35,000/ha plus four years without a harvest). So we try the transformation.

2. The surgery: cutting the horns. This is where it gets serious. A gobelet vine has arms (called "cornes" — horns) that shoot in every direction. To bring it into line and lift it onto the wire (50 cm from the ground), you have to cut what sticks out. It's heartbreaking, and a huge risk. Every cut is an open wound. Cut too much in one go, and the stock can die, or catch a fungus (esca, a kind of septicaemia of the vine).

3. The secret of sap. To limit the risks, we use a precise technique: we cut at bud break (in spring), when the sap is rising hard. Why? Because the sap flowing out naturally "washes" the wound and keeps disease away. Nature's antiseptic.

4. Patience. You can't cut everything in one year. We go in stages, over three years. Remove one horn, wait for the vine to grow back wood, raise a cane… During this transition, we lose 30 to 40% of yield. The vine is in shock; it produces less.

It's a bet on the future. Every transformed stock is one saved from uprooting, one that can be cultivated cleanly, mechanically, for decades to come. That, too, is what being a vigneron means: thinking of the vine that will be there when we are no longer.