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| Leave two spurs! If you only use one side of the vine, the other side will die off. (Wineaustralia.com, 2021) |
I was just catching up on some reading and discovered that we may have unwittingly pruned very effectively in our first years. It turns out that if you leave just one renewal spur, it draws sap up one side of the vine only, and the other side eventually dies off. To keep the sap flowing all through the trunk, keeping two renewal spurs or fruiting canes on opposite sides of the trunk saves the wood from dying off.
Sap flow pruning seems very logical. We did it because we were afraid that only one spur wouldn't;t have a great chance of surviving, and we could always select the stronger spur later on. But now we'll keep it always, with canes going off in opposite directions trained on the overhead wires. I feel fortunate to have been conservative.
