Planting a vineyard? Easy! Dig some holes; drop in the roots. Not so fast. It involve much more structure than that. What you’re doing is establishing a grid that shapes everything for the next half-century: your harvest, your equipment, your labor. Miss by even an inch or two and you’ll be fighting yourself from Day One. Agriculture? No. It is geometry with roots.
How do all these factors play out? The chart above breaks it down. It is a practical map for walking away from the tendency to treat all varieties of grape alike.
How to Space Your Vines Correctly
Generally speaking, European wine grapes such as Cabernet Sauvignon grows along the middle of the road, roughly a six-foot distance between rows. Their growth habits tend to be rather controlled, so they fit nicely into vertical shoot positioning (VSP) systems. You don’t want acres of wasted dirt, but you do want space enough for tractor.
At the other extreme, there are more vigorous American varieties: Concord comes to mind. Compared to its European cousins, this is a weed-like grape that wants space; it need eight feet between vines and sometimes even ten feet, with correspondingly wider aisles. Its canopy is broad and unruly. Try jamming a high-vigor hybrid into your tight wine-grape grid and you’ll get vines overlapping and shading one another, resulting in rotting on the vine.
Spacing math also depends off if you will cane prune or train plants as cordons. With cane pruning, you have a constantly changing situation: Each winter, you cut out previous year’s growth and encourage emergence of new canes. The math here matter because these new canes needs to be spaced evenly, row-to-row, so they don’t tangle up together. When your spacing isn’t regular, it’s just a mess, a tangle of crossed shoots and uneven areas for fruit production, and cane pruning turns into a nightmare.
With cordon training, you create permanent arms that extend onto the trellis wire. You know when each arm fill its space. That’s the difference that the infographic calls attention to, connecting your choice of pruning method directy with how you’ll lay out the rows physically.
How about the width of the alley? You may think that ten feet wide is plenty, but it isn’t. The posts and the trunk take up two feet on each side. Then canopy wall of both rows claims the next several feet. This leaves only a narrow pathway for people to walk or equipment to move through. And if you put in a Geneva Double Curtain trellis, which splits the canopy into two hanging walls, you require even more width. Frequently twelve feet, so the machine doesn’t tear apart fruit.
People makes a mistake thinking an alley represents spare land. It is not. It is where you work.
Then there’s time. Vines don’t immediately reach full size. Year one is the year you’re creating the trunk. Year two see the cordon arms stretching outward toward their neighbors. Not till year three or four does the canopy begin to fill in the allotted spot. Planting the vines immediately in the space they’ll eventualy inhabit saves you the expensive error of ripping out rows, moving vines because they became overcrowded. This isn’t a purchase of a seedling; it’s an early purchase, with your space reserved for eventual plant. It is the best of all worlds, realy.
For example, some varieties, such as low-vigor Pinot Noir, are grown in very dense grids (upwards of one thousand vines per acre) to make the best use of land. Others, like juice varieties or table grapes with strong growth habits, is planted in wider grids to allow for easier access. The key is to match the strength of the rootstock to the in-row distance and size the aisle to match so it accommodate your biggest piece of equipment. It’s a series of trade-offs.
But after laying out that initial row, it’s done. The geometry is set. Might of as well get it right the first time. A vineyard is a long term commitment, after all, and the rows will be there longer than your patience to correct them.