If you have old vines (20-30 years old), you should rejuvenate your vineyard.
It is essential to maintain the health of your vineyard like you maintain your health.
When vineyards are old, they tend to get sick, so the grape quality is getting lower by the year.
In this text, you can find a step-by-step guide on how to rejuvenate your vineyard.
The first year of vineyard rejuvenation
When you decide to rejuvenate your vineyard, you need to start planning the placement of your new vine in advance.
How to plan?
We need to leave a young shoot that came out from the old tree and is located the closest to the base as possible.
In that way, after the growth cycle, you can school that new shoot into a new vine.
After winter dormancy, you should leave the best-developed shoot but if there is no good shoot you can leave 2-3 shots so you can choose in the next year which one to leave.
The second year of vineyard rejuvenation
You leave the shoot that you decided and you can now cut the old tree.
The shoot will grow in size throughout the vegetation.
First thing after the vegetation, you will see that new shoots started to grow from the one you left.
You need to pick the best developed and best placed one of them and leave it for the main one.
Everything else is cut except one extra shoot with 2 buds in case the main shoot breaks or gets damaged.
First tying of shoot to the wiring.
The third year of vineyard rejuvenation
The third year is all about schooling your vine.
Now is a good time to think about pruning styles.
The main goal in the third year is to find the perfect shape of your vine which means the ideal placement of future spurs or canes.
Forth year of vineyard rejuvenation
Now your vineyard is ready.
Final touches to the pruning style.
And the results of your work can begin to show.