Cogitating Pruning

The days are becoming warmer and our thoughts are turning to pruning the vineyard. In the past, our pruning times have varied, largely based on the fact that we were also replanting the vineyard.
In 2014, we began pruning in mid April. In 2015, we again began pruning in mid-April. It took us only a day to prune all of the vines, and in looking at the chart that I put on the blog, we only had 580 plants to prune that year. In 2016, we decided that we would begin pruning in March. The spring of 2016 was an extremely warm year with temperatures reaching 80 degrees in the mid-Atlantic states in March! This was also the year that we would be replanting about 4200 vines so we thought we should get a head start in pruning. In 2017, we were back to pruning in mid-April. This year, we know that we will have many more vines for which we can lay down the canes.
The goal is to make each vine look like this:¹

Here is an example of a cane we laid down last year.

The rule of thumb for the spacing of each bud on the cane is that they should be at least a fist width apart. Since our vines are planted at 4 feet intervals, our canes will be 2-1/2 feet in length and have at most 5 buds on each side of the trunk. In laying down our canes, we hope to orient the buds so that they are facing the sun so that the growing shoot will grow vertically. We will disbud the shoots that are growing toward the ground.
References:
1. Ronald Jackson, Wine Science Third Edition, Elsevier, 2008, pg. 124.