Trees have a “trunk” and can stand up by themselves.
Grapevines have a “trunk” but they can’t stand up by themselves. Left alone in the wild, they cling to something more stable than themselves For instance, like a tree.
If you expect to harvest 12 pounds of grapes from each vine you have planted in an acre, you have to supply something for them to cling to. (You don’t plant trees. They would get in the way.)
Enter the “trellis;” a framework of posts and wires that can support 10,000 pounds of fruit on each acre every year for the next 75 years.
How many posts? Not too many and not too few. Drive around. See what your neighbors have done. It looks like one post for every four vines. That means 215 posts in each acre.
Now wires. How many? Many choices here. We went with seven strands in each row. For each acre, seven strands equals 35,000 feet of wire.
Each wire either gets stapled to the post or suspended on clips. Each post gets a total of 15 staples or clips to keep the wires organized. That’s 3,225 staples or clips.
At both ends of each row, there is a buried slab of concrete with wires connected to the last post that anchors each end of the line of post. These anchors keep the posts and wires from collapsing under the weight of the fruit.
We plant the vines using a GPS-guided planter, which places them precisely in a straight line and exactly six feet apart. With the vines in the ground, we begin pounding in the posts. They need to be exactly aligned with the row of vines. Since everything is carefully positioned, we also make sure that the posts are straight, in both a north-south, east-west direction. If it is going to last 75 years, we want to do it right the first time.
The final step is numbering the rows and marking them with the varietal, the clone and the rootstock. We use aluminum numbers and labels, the same ones that are used to mark utility poles. If these vines are to last 75 years, the people who are taking care of them 75 years from now need to what we planted three generations earlier in this row.
