Pruning in Winter

There's no alternative. When you have over 1200 vines, you have to start in the dead of winter in order to get them all pruned before the buds swell and everything starts to grow. The buds are fragile in the early spring and can easily get knocked off as you wrestle with the canes and determine what to cut off and what to leave in place. We had a ridiculously nice couple of days last week and I started pruning the Sabrevois vines last Thursday. Wow, what a change. It was in the upper 20s today and the wind was blowing pretty hard. Greg had the day off and I wrapped up work around 2:00 and we headed out there. It was gray and gloomy, and just plain cold. We finished a partial row and tackled a second one in the course of about two hours. It went pretty fast with both of us working. We have a total of 23 rows with between 60 and 64 vines per row. At that rate we shouldn't have any trouble getting the pruning done well before the buds start to swell.