Video below of pruning an old vineyard that has been in production for decades, but which has had only limited pruning and summer maintenance in the past few years. This resulted in a lot of unpruned excessive growth, dead wood and extra canes.

This is the first year of overtaking the maintenance of this vineyard. This year’s pruning included the need to remove the overgrown, old and dead wood. Which required the use of all three primary pruner tools: hand pruner, lopping shear and pruning saw.

The vineyard has very close spaced vines (where there are no gaps due to loss of vines), and from inspection was originally cordon pruned. The cordons were cut off at some point, and in more recent years the vines have been cane and spur pruned. The trellis wire is not under tension, is loose, and thus is not the best anchor for yearly canes. So the long term plan is to revert the vines to single or double armed cordons, depending on how close their neighbor vines are.