Unveiling the Mesmerizing Mastery: Meet the Visionary who Transformed Vine Pruning into a Captivating Artistry

Marco Simonit is a detail-oriented person. His recent stay with us in Languedoc was preceded by a list of seven dietary prohibitions. When I showed him his bathroom, he asked me if he shared it with anyone. He was concerned about whether Château Pichon Lalande could be called Pichon Longueville. He called the 2012 Gonet champagne I served him before a (carefully chosen) dinner “good, but too warm.”

Paying attention to viticultural details with the same kind of precision has earned him more than 150 clients around the world, including many of the most revered wine producers. His specialty is pruning vines, a somewhat esoteric topic but a task that every winegrower must perform in every vineyard, every winter.

Until Simonit began working as a pruning consultant about 20 years ago, most winegrowers imposed a fixed pruning pattern, which was usually uniform across all wine regions. Simonit’s technique, sometimes called “gentle pruning,” consists of doing what each strain requires in order to enjoy a long and healthy life.

Although he admits that it takes at least five years to show results, what he is looking for is a vineyard full of balanced vines that mature evenly and do everything possible to resist pests. diseases and the effects of climate change. This holistic approach has never been more attractive than now, when so many grapevines suffer from often fatal trunk diseases, especially esca. “It’s like a pandemic situation all over the world,” according to Simonit.

As a child growing up in Collio, the wine-growing region in the far northeast of Italy, Simonit became curious about the wounds he saw on vines created by standard pruning. When he cut them down, he discovered dead wood, the result of fungi that spread trunk diseases. “No one in the wine schools talked about this. Internet did not exist. There were no books that explained it,” he told me. This was at a time when all the attention of the wine world was on what was happening in the winery, not the vineyard. The winemakers and wine consultants were the superstars.

Since the late 1980s, Simonit has been paying special attention to the vineyards and has been working for the Collio producers’ association for ten years. She understood that the best wines come from old vines and began inspecting particularly old vines, trying to understand exactly why and how they survived.

The idea arose to prune each vine individually, making the smallest cuts that respected the flow of sap and the age of the wood. He then convinced Collio’s famous winemaker, Mario Schiopetto, to let him prune a few rows of vines to test his theories. When Simonit saw how well the vines responded, word spread. In 1999 he left his job to advise local Friuli producers. In 2003 he founded the company Simonit & Sirch with his schoolmate Pierpaolo Sirch, who still takes care of the administrative part of what is now a complicated international operation, with 27 pruning consultants on staff and an annual turnover of almost 4 million euros.

The turning point for Simonit was the visit of the world-famous Italian wine producer Angelo Gaja, who arrived with his teams from Piedmont and Tuscan vineyards and within two weeks signed a contract. Soon Simonit started receiving calls from all over Italy. The late enology professor Denis Dubourdieu of the University of Bordeaux opened the door to his long and illustrious list of French clients, including Ch Latour, Ch d’Yquem and Domaine de la Romanée-Conti. “Denis Dubourdieu changed my life,” Simonit said. But of course, the most famous clients want the most famous consultant, which is a natural deterrent to accepting new business. “Although we can always charge more,” Simonit told me with a smile. When he visited me, he had just returned from advising the team at Champagne Bollinger’s new Oregon outpost, Ponzi Vineyards.

With traditional pruning methods, apart from the increased susceptibility to trunk diseases, yields tend to decrease with the age of the vines, so the vineyards are systematically uprooted and replanted after about 20 years, just when the grape quality improves. But according to Simonit, a well-pruned vine can continue to produce great wine for many more decades.

“When you go to a vineyard, you can read the vines like in a book,” he said. You can’t hide anything.

Since our Languedoc village is surrounded by vines, I thought it was time to go see them. Unfortunately, our nearest vineyard made for unedifying reading. As soon as we saw him, Simonit shook his head. “Cabernet Sauvignon. This guy is super sensitive to esca.” Indeed, large patches of dry brown leaves marked the green in each row. She focused on the vine trunks and pointed out small pieces that were pruning wounds. Rather terrifyingly, she began to break apart huge pieces of dead wood, separating them to reveal the fungus inside. I looked nervously at the houses that overlooked the vineyard, hoping that the owner of the vineyard didn’t live in one of them.

Simonit is explicitly in favor of sharing. “I am never afraid to share knowledge because, by sharing, you learn. Furthermore, ours is the only team in the world in the most important wine regions and we receive a lot of information every day.” During Covid, he wanted to share his experience even more, building the first digital vine pruning teaching platform. The Vine Master Pruners Academy, in Italian, English and Spanish, already has 15,000 subscribers in 14 countries.

According to Simonit, a well-pruned vineyard can continue to produce great wine for many more decades.

In addition to their recently opened hotel-pruning academy in Collio, in 2016 they created a master’s degree in pruning and thinning of shoots at the University of Bordeaux. And in collaboration with several other research institutes and universities, they have in-person pruning schools in Italy, Napa Valley, Lake County, Oregon, the United Kingdom in Plumpton, Geisenheim in Germany, Adelaide Hills, Hungary and Tarragona.

But I suspect that what Simonit is most proud of is the social effect of his training, especially in California and South Africa, where vineyard workers have historically been undervalued and undertrained. By becoming an international wine superstar, Simonit has elevated the work in the vineyards and, with it, the vineyard workers.

“When we started working with wineries in California, we needed to teach the teams in the field. No one had taught Mexican workers before. But now they feel as important as the people who work in the basement. “It is having a real social impact, just like in South Africa where we have five people at the moment because it is pruning season there.” The same is true, he says, in Australia, where Simonit has worked with his famous old vines and with Penfolds on their 140-year-old Block 42 Cabernet Sauvignon, with all the Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian workers there. “They say, ‘Wow, someone is teaching us now.’”

This is something much bigger than a detail.

Tasting notes, ratings and suggested drink dates in the Purple Pages of JancisRobinson.com. International distributors in winesearch.com

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