Spring Pruning

The unpruned Muscat Canelli. Notice the jungle like appearence. What you can’t see is the hardened tendrils (small curly q’s that the vine wraps around anything it can). These guys are a menace when it comes to pruning.

Here is a single Muscat Canelli vine. Everything must be removed from this vine save for the trunk, arms, and a few spurs that contain about 3 buds each. At the bottom of the vine you can see the suckers. Although we will cut these back, the vine will grow more. This may seem like an undesirable trait but in the event of another hard winter freeze these suckers will act as the replacement to the main vine.

Here is a pre-pruned vine. Here in Idaho we seem to get a mysterious 5th season between winter and spring. It is not cold like the winter and it is not windy and rainy like the typical spring, instead it is actually sunny and fairly warm. This is a great time to get out of the house that winter has trapped us in and pre-prune the vineyard. At this time it is still a little too early to fully prune the vines (we do this as late as possible to delay bud-break) but it allows us to get a head start and save a little time so the actual pruning can go much quicker.

This is the finished vine. You can see on this spur two buds were left, on at the base where the spur meets the arm and one a little less than halfway up the spur. Each of these buds will produce two clusters of grapes. Since we leave between 20 and 30 buds (10 spurs at two to three buds per spur) each vine will produce 40 to 60 clusters. It’s amazing what can come out of just a couple of tiny buds.

This is also a finished vine. You can see that this years spur is situated on top of last years spur. You will also probably notice that this is an older vine.

Remember: not all at Indian Creek is work. The sign on the barrel room door reminds us to have fun and relax as well.