How to Prune Grapevines: Cordon de Royat

A step by step guide to pruning a grape vine to Cordon de Royat. Winemaker and Professor of Winemaking Emmanuel Pageot of Domaine Turner Pageot in the Languedoc region of France provides a clear, step by step guide on his Syrah vines in the south of France.

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we’re working on this fantastic block of syrah called Cadables after the the volcano on which it is grown and the idea today is to remove the excess shoots in order to facilitate the pruning later on We gather those shoots and in a few weeks time come back and burn the shoots and return both carbon and potassium to the ground as a natural fertilizer so it’s that easy you just go along and pull away the upper part of the shoots and makes a nice little bundle and then later on we’ll come back and we’ll do what we call a cordon de royat which is a spare pruning two bud spur pruning and like so always the spur facing towards the sky here at our estate we try to stick to a two bud per spur pruning allowing space between the spurs here for example it’s a bit too cramped so here we go now we have the right spacing and keep doing it one two buds one two buds and one two buds

a voila here we have a here we have a nice cordon de royat which is one two three four five six between six and seven spurs per vine that should give us roughly 30 to 35 hectoliters per hectare which is what we expect to make our fine wines and that’s all there is to it really try to leave enough space between the spurs to allow air and sunlight into the vines and keep disease pressure at bay or as low as possible and produce fine wines