Happy New Year! Lovely here that all the younger Awtys made it back for Christmas (see our Photo of the month). We’re emerging into the light now after a festive hibernation of candlelight and log fires.

The couple of months after harvest were really busy and buzzy with some fab family occasions and lots of Christmas wine-selling events. Hectic and fun but now it’s lovely to be pruning peacefully again, just me, Milo and the wild birds wheeling and tumbling in the blustery wind. That’s not dust against the sky on the top photo, it’s hundreds of rooks, jackdaws and maybe the odd raven - we do have ravens nesting here in the vineyard hedge. Distinctive croak. Iain meanwhile is tied up in his annual wrestle with the accounts. He’ll be pruning too when that’s done.

It’s been warm and lately pretty unremittingly wet. Squelchy underfoot but no serious flooding here so far, and lovely sunny spells between. I’ll finish pruning the top Madeleine Angevine block tomorrow, weather permitting - yep, a fine weather pruner, me - better not to cut the vines in the wet, which is when the fungal spores fly, and electric pruners don’t like damp. As we’re small we have the luxury of choosing - in bigger vineyards there’s no skiving off for a bit of rain.

The Madeleine, where we’ve been converting from spur to replacement cane pruning, are now settled and pruning is pretty straightforward again. The "gentle pruning" method advocated by vine guru Duncan McNeill, is leading to nice, compact crowns on the new trunks we’ve trained up on these 30 year old veterans, with strong, usually well-placed growth to tie down for fruiting. Unsurprisingly there’s some trunk disease in these old vines but we're finding that replacing the trunks, this “gentle” pruning for straight-as-possible trunk wood and minimal cutting, and painting the pruning wounds is giving lots of them a lease of life beyond their allotted span. They’re bearing well and producing wine that just seems to keep on getting better.

Excitingly, the tallest of our new gap-filling babies have some cane to lay down this year. Always a thrill to get to a new vine that will be fruiting for the first time. It needs concentration to place the first, important pruning cuts. They fix the position of the first spur that will be the basis of the vine’s future crown and the first small fruiting cane to be tied down horizontal in a couple of months time, to grow, we hope, two or three small grape bunches on its side shoots this year.

Good yesterday to see Chris, Jill, their daughter Haidee and her boys (right) who are resurrecting the old HRH vineyard down on the Somerset levels at Curload. They came to see how we prune our high-trained vines as they get to grips with vines that haven’t been pruned for a while. Delighted that two roe deer, sheltering in our nature area beyond the vines, broke cover when they walked up. So beautiful, bounding over the undergrowth.