Has anyone grafted new vines?

[peasants bottom]

I have a vineyard of about 350 vines, of which about 100 are Sangiovese and 250 are white in Central Italy. These are very old vines, and are really struggling now, especially the red. It has been suggested to me that we could graft new vines on to the old root stock and in that way we could crop new red wine grapes much quicker than planting new vines. Has anyone done this? Do you think it will work? When would you have to do it? Can you graft new red wine grapes stock on to old white grape stock? Where could I buy vines to graft on? I am relying on you all to have all this knowledge, and look forward to your answers.

 

[Racer]

I've been growing grapes for about 7 years now but havent grafted any vines yet myself.You can graft on old vines, but can I ask why you want to do that? Most pros say that even though yields drop off on older vines the quality of the grapes increases.

I'm in my second semester of viticulture classes and will be learning to graft and start cuttings but that will be in about a month or 2.

 

[peasants bottom]

That sounds really helpful Racer! Hurry up with the rest of your course, and pass on the information!
The reason we are thinking of grafting onto old stock is because we have huge numbers of very vigorous white grape vines, but we don't like the wine that we get from it, and very few, not so vigorous red wine vines. So we are hoping to initially try out grafting new red wine stock onto old white grape rootstock to see whether we can boost the amount of red grape must. Thats the theory anyway!

 

[Racer]

I dont know if you can get these books or not but "the grape grower" by Lon Rombough and "Viticulture volume 2 practices" by B.G. Coombe and P.R. Dry do have sections on how to graft.

To answer another question you had, yes you can graft a red wine vine type onto a white wine type vine. If you cant find a source for grafting stock just remember you do have your own sangiovese vines that you can get cuttings from and can use them for grafting too.

 

[peasants bottom]

Thanks Racer that is really helpful information. I will try and source those books now. Do you know what time of year you have to graft? Is it before the sap rises?

 

[Racer]

When to graft depends on which method you decide is the best for your situation but one thing you do need is grafting material.When do you normally prune your vines? And are you past that time already? Hopefully you can save some of your prunings for grafting stock.