On the Vine

Arthur Goode shares the importance of being on the vine, from a personal interest in the cultivation of vines that goes beyond the fact that his church is known as the Vineyard.

About this time of year vineyards all over Europe are in bud – flowers will be pollinating, tiny little grapes beginning to form. It’s business time in the vineyard! All winter they will have been pruned. Pruning a vine is a brutal process, cutting growth right back and leaving what looks a bit like a dead stump rising up from the ground. The older the vine the thicker the stump. And brutal for those slowly working their way around the vines, secateurs in hand, back breaking work in the cold. And then there is the worrying time of flowering – right at the point that frosts could return.

If they do they can damage the young buds – they could die, drop off and set the grape production back weeks, with a lowered yield to boot. It can be devastating, which is why in Bordeaux last month they had little fires growing in between the vines, burning the clippings from the winter’s pruning. Or little oil lamps warding off the frosts. In the most extreme cases they flew helicopters over the vines to blow down slightly warmer air onto the freezing ground. And get this – they even spray water on some vines, which then freezes, and the ice protects the immature buds. It looks amazing. Frost damage cost the French wine industry an estimated 2 billion Euros last year, so it’s worth the effort to protect the vines.

I have a personal interest in viticulture (the cultivation of vines to produce wine) that goes beyond the fact that my church is the Vineyard Church, and I have invested time and money in developing my experience in this area of learning (by which I mean buying and drinking cheap plonk in serious quantities). I also have a brother who’s job it is to taste wines, write about them and travel the world to talk to people about wine. Tough gig that one. Meanwhile I remain here in Plymouth and pursue my more amateur approach.

But there are spiritual lessons to be learnt from the vine, and Jesus himself used the metaphor of vineyards and wine quite a lot.

Take pruning, for instance. Not only are they cut right back in winter but throughout the growing season the vines are pruned of unproductive branches, leaves that get in the way of the fruit, and small bunches of fruit that are unlikely to amount to anything. The idea is that all the energy needs to go into growing fruit – lots of green growth will waste that energy.

The lesson we can learn here is to know what our fruit is and focus on growing it – what needs pruning in your life? As Jim Collins would no doubt say, cut out the good to achieve the great.

Soil: I am currently adding lots of compost and leaf mould to my vegetable patch in order to get fertile soil in which to grow things. Not so the vine! Too many nutrients and you get loads of green growth (see pruning above). Too much water and the grapes are too big and without the intense flavour needed for good wine. Tough soil produces less fruit with more flavour, and the roots go down deep to find what they need. Don’t be too soft on a vine.

The lesson here is that hardship is good for us. Building qualities that help us thrive in life, as well as making us better people. The current focus on finding and maintaining happiness actually leads to the opposite outcome. Better to focus on joy, which doesn’t depend on the avoidance of suffering, rather uses suffering to grow us, leading to more joy and as a consequence more happiness, and a happiness that lasts to boot.

Grafting: this is where you take good root stock and attached a stem of another plant onto that root. In the 1800’s a little weevil called Phylloxera spread and killed all the European vines and there was nothing they could do about it. They only way the wine industry was saved was through taking resistant root stock from South America (Chile is now the only country with original ungrafted vines – called ‘old vines’ – protected from infection by the Andes) and grafting vitus vinifera onto it.

Apart from being an interesting fact to impress your friends and neighbours with, it is a wonderful picture of adoption. Anyone who has adopted a child will know that they are taken into the family and grafted in as if they were born into it. And the Bible talks of a similar thing when someone decides to follow Christ. Jesus talks of people being grafted onto the vine. This also helps explain how we all have a disease – called sin – that affects us, and by being grafted onto Jesus, the vine, we can be healed. He is the healthy root stock that is sin-resistant.

“Men are like wine – some turn to vinegar, but the best improve with age.” ― Pope John XXII