With an upcoming trip to Napa Valley coming up, I’ve made an effort to familiarize myself with the vineyard sites and producers we will be visiting. After reading more in depth about Kapcsandy I came across a video of Lou Kapcsandy describing the viticulture efforts in their vineyards. Of note, he described how they’ve trained their vines 18-24" higher than average in order to limit the degree of sunlight on their grape clusters and base of the vines (based on their row spacing). It seems like an incredibly obvious and rather intuitive concept but hardly one that I’ve given much thought.
So down the rabbit hole we go. Is there a means of determining an ideal methodology for row height, spacing, leaf pulling, trellising (Guyot, cordon, VSP, etc) based on a site or variety? Would warmer areas benefit from higher row heights and greater leaf-pulling to limit photosynthesis (and carbohydrate production) while simultaneously shading grape clusters? (and how many leaves per shoot are ideal?) Clearly principles of canopy management and trellising have an impact on limiting mildew and rot, but what about in terms of producing wines of greater quality?
Perhaps this is a totally boring and snooze-worthy topic for discussion, but for whatever reason it intrigues me. What about everyone else? ![[berserker.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/8/8600bbd4810d342b8fbd4ffb62b4f0026275fd37.gif "berserker"){kind=small}