Out of my head training

Ever had one of those moments when just as you are starting to feel confident that you’re starting to become somewhat educated on a topic and then you get smacked with your own ignorance like a pie in the face?  Well, that happened to me last night at a seminar on vineyard pruning.

I had always thought that the vines in our vineyard were head-trained.  It was one of the early things I “learned” about the vineyards that made me feel like I was becoming educated about viticulture.  When people would ask why our vines looked different from the ones they were used to seeing in Napa and Sonoma, I would confidently tell them it was because our vines were head-trained, a very traditional method used in France.

Over time I became a little bit curious why our vines didn’t quite look like other head-trained vineyards I’d see in Amador or Lodi.  Those vines were much lower to the ground and their spurs were at more of the same elevation and distributed around the trunk in sort of a goblet fashion.  This was a curiosity and I thought that perhaps ours were a different style of pruning, or that maybe they weren’t pruned properly early on.  I never even considered that there was any other name to describe them other than head-trained.

Last night I attended a seminar on grape vine pruning put on by the Placer County Wine and Grape Association (PCWGA) at a local winery.  Dick Stallman, a local grower was demonstrating proper pruning techniques for members, and he brought with him a head trained vine and a spur pruned double cordon vine upon which to demonstrate.  Before he began the demonstration he also described another common training method often used by home vineyard owners in the area called vertical cordon which sounded quite familiar and then he passed around a picture of this training method.  I was completely dumb-founded.  We didn’t have head-trained vines after all – they are vertical cordons! So much for me having a clue.  There’s still so much to learn.

Vertical cordon is an old world training method that was designed to get a lot of grapes in a small area, and gives more of a tree or bush like appearance.