Thursday, March 21, 2013

Like I said before, hello Syrah!

I began pruning the Syrah vines today and, with Vinomaker's help, got two rows of the Cabernet Sauvignon canes tied down.  The weather was beautiful, so it was great to be outdoors all day after yesterday's rain.
One, rather short, row of Syrah is bilateral cordon trained. Training the Syrah this way was an experiment that worked, or rather didn't.  In my opinion, Syrah is too vigorous of a grape variety for bilateral training. Syrah could perhaps be quadrilateral cordon trained (site specific, of course), but head-training seems to favour this the wild child of grape varieties. However, I have to admit that old cordon-trained vines are interesting to look at, as every previous vintage's pruning wounds are more obvious than on the head-trained vines.  Band-Aid, anybody?

2 comments:

Thud said...

My head needs training!

Vinogirl said...

Thud: I'll speak with sister-in-law OTW about that!