Chips and spread.

Yes, here it is, the obligatory, annual, first pile-of-prunings photograph.  I managed to finish pruning Vinoland's table-grapes today.  It took me a whopping 10 minutes to prune the remaining two vines.  I was exhausted afterwards, hee, hee.  The pruning of the table grapes created a small pile of vine-prunings, small enough that I could probably pick the whole thing up quite readily with both arms.
It's a completely different story when I get to the wine-grapes. 
It still amazes me, each and every year, how much vegetative-material the vines produce.  It's a viticultural miracle that nutrients in the soil combined with water and sunshine can create so much vegetation, shoots and leaves galore.  (Well, pruning determines the number of shoots, but Mother Nature dictates shoot-length.)  And clusters of grapes on top of that.
Of course, all that pruned wood needs to be disposed of.  The Napa Valley Grape Growers outline, in their Best Practices, an online educative resource, the four main ways of disposing of prunings; chop and disc; chop and cover crop; chip with a chipper; burn like billy-o.  (I predict, in the not so distant future that burning will be banned outright in the Napa Valley, even though it is the most efficient way of disposing of grapevine material.)  In Vinoland, we chip and spread - a practice that works best for our modest vineyard operation - returning all that vegetative matter back to the ground from whence it came.

Vino inferno.

What a great idea, burning old cordons in a BBQ instead of briquettes.  Today was the annual harvest party that the vineyard workers at TWWIAGE throw for everybody.  It's the best Mexican food, ever!  The hot, bubbled, cordon-toasted tortillas were delicious.  Burn baby burn.

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?

Kicker canes.

Pruning in the Napa Valley is in full right swing now.  I hope to begin pruning Vinoland's black grape varieties today or tomorrow. Vinoland is very fortunate not to have an issue with high vigour in the vineyard.  The vines here are rather well balanced individuals, in part due to the fact that they are head trained and in some part due to the fact that our soil is lousy. Except for one small area that is.  In that particular location the vines are planted a little closer together, one row is cordon trained and, seemingly, the vines have found something particularly appealing to them beneath their roots - so they misbehave.  But, what if high vigour was an issue here, as it is on the highly fertile valley floor?  What could be done to suppress the vigour in the vines at the onset of their annual growing cycle? Planting a cover crop could be one solution, but another approach would be to leave kicker canes on the vines.
A kicker cane (aka a sacrificial cane or a vigour diversion cane) can be very helpful in controlling overly enthusiastic vines. This method involves retaining supplemental, disposable canes at pruning time - at the crown of a head trained vine, or at the apical end of a cordon trained vine.  In the cordon trained vine, a kicker cane takes advantage of a grapevines natural disposition towards apical dominance and can also aid in delaying budbreak. Increasing the number of buds retained per vine has an overall vigour reduction effect as the kicker cane becomes a sink for new growth.  Later, after budbreak, the entire cane will be removed to ensure it doesn't sap too much of the vine's vigour.  In the photograph above it is clear that when the kicker cane is removed only the desired 2 bud spur, on this old quadrilateral-cordon trained vine, will remain.
Okay, that's enough of that, I'm off outside to prune!

The trouble with...

...cordon-training grapevines is the number of cuts, wounds really, that are inflicted upon the vine every year at pruning time. Potentially, each cut is indeed a wound through which any of a number of pathogens could enter into the vine e.g. the fungal disease Eutypa lata.

In the best possible scenario, for the cordon-trained vine in the above photograph, the vine has a minimum of 20 pruning wounds; one to remove one of last year's shoots and one to form this year's new 2 bud spur in each of its ten different positions. In comparison, the head-trained/cane-pruned vines in Vinoland have a mere 6 wounds; one to remove last years cane, one at the end of the new cane and one to form this year's 2 bud spur. The less wounds, the less chance of infection.

However, sometimes large wounds are unavoidable and that's why I have been known to daub Dreft on large cuts. You can see two really large wounds in the photo but on the bright side, this particular vine now has two brand new spurs on this one cordon alone.

Of course, there are many other considerations for choosing one style of training over another, but I personally think vine health is one of the, if not the, most important.

Anyhow...congratulations to the folks at Far Niente on the budbreak of their 2011 Chardonnay vintage.

Clueless in Coombsville.

I may not be Napa's greatest pruner, I know I'm certainly not the fastest, but I definitely do a better job, of pruning grapevines, than one of Vinoland's closest neighbours.
What the hell? I think this vine is cordon-trained, although I can't be totally sure. It's crazy, it's a mess - I have never seen so many spurs and buds left on one vine...it is vinsanity!
I suppose I could offer my services, but if I did I'd miss out on the entertainment value of seeing how this gentleman's vineyard progresses through the year. Like a good accident, as much as I feel sympathy for the vine, I cannot pass up this voyeuristic opportunity.