Vine pruning experiment

[NorCal]

I have 17, 15 year old Cab Franc head trained vines in my front yard. I'm going to experiment this year with suckering the vines to either one or two shoots per spur. I'll get the exact, plant by plant stats later this week, but there are 5 or 6 spurs on each plant, and then one or two shoots per spur and two clusters per shoot. Each plant will yield 10-24 clusters. My plan is to follow the growth and in the end, weigh the clusters, check brix and the pH. If I have the energy, I will ferment and make two separate batches of wine, to see if there is any discernible difference in the quality of the wine.

I would expect:
1. 1 shoots to be bigger (but not 2x)
2. 1 shoots to ripen sooner
3. 1 shoots to be lower pH
4. 1 shoots to make better wine

 

[JohnT]

When was bud break? seems like your vine's growth is pretty far along.

 

[bchilders]

Should be interesting. Do you plan to sucker half? How many shoots will you end up with on the non-suckered vines?

Also, with regards to your training method, do you have to add support for the shoots after clusters start filling out due to cluster weight pulling them down?

 

[NorCal]

When was bud break? seems like your vine's growth is pretty far along.

Bud break was about 3 weeks ago.

 

[NorCal]

Should be interesting. Do you plan to sucker half? How many shoots will you end up with on the non-suckered vines?

Also, with regards to your training method, do you have to add support for the shoots after clusters start filling out due to cluster weight pulling them down?

I suckered all of them (remove unwanted growth) half of them have one shoot per spur, half will have two shoots per spur.

These are trained in the traditional southern French head trained style. They do not receive any other support for the vines. Makes it difficult to spray and harvest on a large scale, but seems to work well with this variety in this area.

 

[NorCal]

Vines are growing like weeds. Had to share this pic of a Mourvedre cluster. It will be the size of a football when ripe.

 

[JohnT]

Vines are growing like weeds. Had to share this pic of a Mourvedre cluster. It will be the size of a football when ripe.
http://s1238.photobucket.com/user/c...C2B26E52-5394-455B-93CD-8D538F49339C.jpg.html

As we say in Jersey... FRIGGIN AWESOME!

 

[ibglowin]

Thats so crazy! Here the rest of the grape growing world in the Northern Hemisphere is looking at grapes just forming and you look like your a month or so away from verasion!

Vines are growing like weeds. Had to share this pic of a Mourvedre cluster. It will be the size of a football when ripe.

 

[Kraffty]

"Wish they all could be California grapes" Syrah this morning and something called a blueberry grape that I'm not sure what I'll do with

 

[Kraffty]

Forgot to add the syrah

 

[NorCal]

That Syrah is huge!