You can either cane or spur prune it, but I prefer Cane Pruning for the Northwest. If you spur prune, you leave 3 bud 'spurs' of one year old wood with three buds. Cane pruning would leave two canes of about 12-14 buds length. the largest clusters come with Cane Pruning. Spurs should be about 6 inches apart on the older 'cordon'.

This is timely. This morning I took a long drive through the desert and found myself in the middle of the Coachella Valley Red Flame Commercial Grape acres. I noticed a ton of workers with umbrellas, so i stopped. Harvest time! Workers in the 108 degree heat, harvesting the Red Flame Grapes. They do cane prune. These vines are very fat and old. They keep them short too. Nothing over 5' tall. There are miles of grapes here. This is the optimum zone 9b for Thompson Seedless and Red Flame. The commercial growers sell to Costco, so I imagine Costcos everywhere will be receiving shipments soon! I am the only wine grape grower here in this land of perpetual sun, I think. Everyone probably knows something I don't, but I had to research hard and find vitis vinifera that craves heat and wind. I found the vines. Had to go to Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Australia for them, and I have the strangest assortment of wine grapes ever!! I'm looking forward to see how they blend at wine making time. None of my varieties can take a freeze, so it would be senseless for me to list them for you. It's just important to find varieties that will thrive in your particular climate. Good luck to you! Suzi

Good to hear about the Interlaken, those are the ones I need to provide shade. Bad to hear about the Canadice, that's the one to stop the first rays of sun (assuming it lives, it hasn't woken up yet), but at least I guess I put it in the right place. I got the "old" vines moved over to the T trellis. They're only about 6" too low, maybe a little stretching will get them to straighten up and take up some of that. I can't believe how long and thick the lower cane on the Himrod got, too bad it's all on that one and not spread out to all the shoots. I bet both grapes on the Kniffen could've taken up the whole 16' by themselves. I think the T will do better and they can spread out rather than all run down the same wire, what a tangled mess. Now that the vine is pulled over the patch to weed eat isn't that huge, it may be tolerable for the rest of the year. Almost done on the trellis (of course I've been thinking that for a few days and I keep remembering something else needed to finish it). I assume that since I'm removing the whole lower tier and not replacing it that any time after dormancy will be OK to prune that part.

We had several different varieties, one was Flame, growing on a fence... for 'looks' mostly. At first I carefully cut each kind according to the 'rules' and didn't get much crop. After DH took over the pruning they got cut back every year following no rules, and in-between if they got out-of-bounds, and the critters enjoyed an abundant grape harvest, of which we occasionally were able to rob a bunch or two. As to your specific question about cordons: the more cordons allowed, the more fruit. I typically had 4 major branches per plant and DH cut them back to what was tied to the fence.... 4 feet. Whatever buds grew off that were what we had for the season.