Beaune Viticultural School: Learning to Prune

The first in a series about how future winemakers are trained in Burgundy.

“At schools they teach you how to make industrial wine. They train you for that. If you don’t already know how to make wine beforehand, if you don’t have any idea, you’re dead.” - Burgundy négoçiant Philippe Pacalet

Like, I suspect, many wine writers, I have over the years spent many mornings and afternoons touring vineyard parcels in the company of highly intelligent vignerons, recording their observations about the nuances of viticulture, understanding almost nothing.

Seeking to remedy this situation, earlier this month I began studies in Beaune to obtain a professional license in viticulture and winemaking. In French it’s called a BPREA: a brevet de responsable d’entreprise agricole. It’s not an oenology degree (which is much more prestigious and selective), nor is it a BTS, a brevet de technicien superieur, which is a marginally more demanding and time-consuming degree. The BPREA is just a degree that permits you to demonstrate to banks and the government that you are capable of piloting an estate. It’s helpful if you want to receive a bank loan or subsidies for young farmers.

I don’t actually intend to found a wine estate. But I’m at an age where I’ve begun to envision living in the countryside. If I’m going to live in the countryside, let it be a wine region. And if it will be a wine region, I figure, why not try to farm a small vineyard parcel, to produce wine for home consumption? I don’t as yet possess the financial means to achieve even this small goal. But I figured I might as well advance towards it if I can. Doing this BPREA requires doing a certain number of hours of internships with wine estates, which should permit me to test the waters, as it were, in a variety of wine regions. I’m doing the degree in a part-time, distance-learning format, which can be conducted over a five-year span. Since it’s sort of a piddly degree, I’m aiming to get it done in just one year, which will involve being present at school in Beaune for about two weeks of each month until July.

The first course I took concerned pruning. (Unfortunately, grouped together with the pruning training was a wholly useless course in basic wine-tasting, which I’ll cover in a separate article.) The pruning training consists of a morning of theory in a classroom, a day of mostly theory in a vineyard, and a day of actual pruning in a vineyard, followed by a brief exam conducted in a vineyard at the end of the week. I was extremely nervous about the exam, because I was obliged to miss the full day of practical pruning training in order to attend a meeting in Paris to obtain a residence permit. (I have been able to live in France for the last 11 years thanks to my UK passport, which Brexit has recently rendered invalid for rights of residency in France.)

The sum total of my prior pruning experience was one afternoon tagging along with Fleurie vigneronne Julie Balagny and her team in 2016. There were five of us that day and only four pairs of pruning shears, with the result that I spent most of the time watching. This was probably for the best, given the importance of pruning on the future of each vine. When you prune, you determine the potential yield for each plant, while sculpting and guiding its future growth. The growth of each plant, meanwhile, must take into account the health and longevity of the plant as well as the farming regimen in place at a given estate. Most modern estates take great care to train vines on wires, in strict rows, to allow for the passage of agricultural machinery for working the soil, spraying treatments, trimming foliage, and, in depressingly many cases, machine harvesting.

As a task, pruning must be truly vexing to organize, because it is both highly skilled and very low-paid. (I recall Inès Métras mentioning once that it pays something like 8 centimes per plant.) Pruners have to work quickly and thoughtfully, crouched low, in the cold, for long periods at a stretch. They must also adapt their working methods to the specific aims of each employer.

My afternoon’s experience in Fleurie turned out to have no bearing whatsoever on the pruning I learned in Beaune. After making cursory explanations of gobelet training (as is common in the Beaujolais) and cordon de Royat (apparently common in the grand cru vines of Burgundy), the Beaune course was devoted solely to the vine training known as guyot simple. It’s a training system that emphasizes yield over the maintenance of a healthy sap flow within the plant, and as such I understand it has fallen out of favor among most natural vignerons in France.

The training was nonetheless very enlightening. “There’s nothing more personal than pruning,” the first tutor cautioned, after laying down the simple edict that one should never, ever carry the big shears draped around one’s neck like a horse’s harness. “One tutor will say one thing and the next will say another. And that’s okay.”

I suspect she said this in direct reference to the two tutors who guided our theory course in a chemically-farmed, machine-harvested Côte de Beaune vineyard the following day. One was a fast-talking, veteran estate manager, a salt of the earth Burgundian, who became perturbingly enthusiastic when explaining the benefits (!) of machine harvesting. In pruning, he clearly prized linearity above all, envisioning his role as assuring that the vines made way for the machines.

The other tutor was a plucky and sensible winegrower from the Mâconnais who farmed organically and sold her grapes to Julien Guillot and Julien Altaber, among other discerning natural vignerons. She has no guyot-trained vines at her own estate, where vines are instead trained in guyot-Poussard, an adaptation that most acknowledge is more respectful of the sap flow of the plant. Her pruning goals, even upon these abused Côte de Beaune vines, prioritized opening up each plant, seeking a V formation that would encourage even sap flow and greater aeration as a safeguard against mildew.

I tried to listen to her more than him. I read over all the relevant texts I could find in the evening. (There was nothing else to do in the evenings. A 6PM COVID curfew had been installed the very day I arrived in Beaune.) I was concerned about the exam, because it was to be administered by two still different tutors. And I had missed the most important day of training.

The exam was conducted on a freezing windy morning in another miserable machine-harvested parcel called “Les Sceaux” a ten minute walk from the campus. (It turns out that pruning machine-harvested vines is sort of like pruning with training wheels, since the machines leave the blackened grape stems still attached to the plant, making it very simple to determine which of the previous year’s branches were fruit-bearing and which were not.) It was conducted as a solo interview amid the vines. My questioners were two frank, thorough young men, one of whom spent the entire interview with a big pair of shears draped around his neck like a horse’s harness.

I was asked to identify the various elements of a vine’s anatomy, and to prune one vine. There followed questions ranging from how many buds are permitted per vine in Burgundy (eight), to what were the signs of vigor in a given vine (presence of gourmands, entre-coeurs, wood thickness, etc.). I failed to identify grapevine fanleaf virus, never having been shown it during the lessons I attended. The interview was over in what seemed like far less time than that of the preceding candidate, and I paced back to the center of Beaune in a rueful mood. The BPREA in Beaune, while a piddly degree, is not cheap when conducted as a part-time, distanced-learning degree. In fact it appears to be priced in a sort of opportunistic way to take advantage of what surely must be a surfeit of demand, among professionals in other sectors seeking a career change, to spend time in Burgundy. I did not want to fail, or have to re-do, any lessons of this piddly degree.

I was very relieved to learn via email, few days later, that I’d passed the pruning exam. Splendid, I thought. Now there remains only to learn how to prune in a qualitative fashion on anything other than machine-harvested guyot simple.

To be fair, there is no way the CFA Viticole de Beaune could prepare students for every style of vine training. As it is, I’m very happy even to have been made aware of the complexity of the subject. It’s a start.