Vine Training Systems:

The growth form of a vine profoundly influences its overall performance as well as many aspects of a grower's vine management. Therefore, I place the choice of a vine training system fourth in importance when establishing a new vineyard after: (1) whether or not to plant a vineyard, (2) the site for the vineyard, and (3) the variety/rootstock combination to be planted. The increasing recognition of the importance of vine training systems has generated a dramatic increase in discussion and written material about this topic in recent years. This activity stems from an improving understanding of vine function and efforts to translate that understanding into improved vine performance. The phrases "canopy management", "leaf removal", "shoot positioning", "fruit exposure", etc., all have their beginnings in the vineyard with the choice of a vine training system. New vine training systems are appearing with great frequency. If one were to plot the number of new vine training systems per year on a graph, the trend would suggest that by the year 2010 we will have many hundreds of vine training systems from which to choose! Many of these new vine training systems are conceptually exciting because they hold the prospect of improved vine performance over many of the traditional vine training systems. Nevertheless, this rapidly expanding topic can certainly bewilder even the veteran grower. Therefore, before one weighs the positive and negative attributes of several specific vine training systems, it may be useful to reflect on the basic purposes of vine training, to resolve one's priorities among those purposes and to recognize possible compromising factors in one's choice of a vine training system. The following discussion is intended to guide that process.