Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 2.16 Vines at 1-m spacing on sandy, gravelly soil at Chateau Giscours, Margaux
Appellation, Médoc region, France.
and southern Spain, vines are planted at wide spacings and pruned in a way that
trellis support is not needed.
In addition to the natural factors determining site potential (summarized in
table 2.4), vine vigor is influenced by whether irrigation water is used and how
much. Thus, on high-potential sites in warm regions under irrigation, wide
between-row (up to 3.4 m) and in-row spacings (up to 2.4 m) were employed to
accommodate the high vigor of the vines grown. Additionally, given that labor was
scarce and costly in many New World vineyards, such wide spacings made a vine-
yard easier to manage with machinery. In the Central Valley region of California,
the standard trellis used to support vigorous vine growth was a two-wire, vertical,
non-shoot positioned system called the Californian Sprawl (Dokoozlian, 2009).
Since the early 1990s, however, even with the Californian Sprawl, row spacings
have decreased to 2.6 m and in-row spacing to 1.6 to 1.8 m, giving plant densities
of 2200 to 2400 per ha. In coastal regions of California, the Napa and Sonoma
Valleys, and most of the cool climate vineyards in Australia and New Zealand, closer
vine spacings with vertically shoot positioned trellising are preferred. However, the
need to mechanize operations as much as possible to reduce costs generally imposes
a limit on the closeness of rows, and achieving an optimum leaf area per meter
of row determines the in-row spacing. Nevertheless, some high-end producers in
these countries have planted at very high densities, as discussed in box 2.7.
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