Pruning Season

The last photos we posted (found in our Hard At Work post) showed us preparing the vineyard for pruning. These photos show the vineyard immediately after it was pruned. You see that each of last year’s canes is cut to the spur positions of each vine. Our vineyard manager’s 10 man crew pruned our 4600 vines in 8 hours. They are skilled and fast!

After pruning, we go through the vineyard and remove the canes the pruners drop on the ground. Each of our 4600 vines has approximately 8 spur positions, 4 on each side of the trunk. From each spur position we allow 2 canes to grow. That’s approximately 74,000 canes that we removed from the vineyard. We are unskilled and slow!

The remaining photos show 2 large piles of canes that are burned after they dry.