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WINEMAKING regions where smarter vine management pays off, consider this mechanical edge in new and possibly existing plantings. View video in the Digital Edition. See the VITECO Cane Pruner in action. Viteco's tractor-mounted Cane Pruning System won top honors for trimming labor costs. that seize and chop vine canes and drop them to earth for subsequent disking. An innovative lifting system for horizontal support wires strips off prunings and feeds them into the shredder head, completely clearing the wires of canes and tendrils. The system is then ready for wires to be repositioned and new fruiting canes tied off, considerably reducing manual work. Particularly well-suited to large plantings, this machine might tip the balance away from cordon architecture in new plantings of Pinot Noir and Pinot Grigio in Monterey and Lodi. Curious growers should check out the video at ero-viti.com/Products/ ERO-Cane-Pruner-VITECO/index.html. In Germany, essentially everything is Guyot, but row lengths may be too short for a mechanical system to pay off. Pruning systems are a chicken-and-egg phenomenon. Innovations like the Viteco have the potential to change the math and alter grower decisions about trellising systems. I suggest that new plantings of varieties that benefit from cane pruning, as well as growers of large plantings in cool premium Analytical innovations Since its introduction in 2003, the FOSS WineScan has developed a reputation for efficient, accurate and quick determination of complex parameters in wine. Acquiring a lofty reputation for delivering a nearly complete wine panel, its inability to measure SO2 seemed a thoughtless omission. But concentration is detected directly through infrared submitted to Fourier Transform mathematics. As with A/O, red wine FSO2 O2 year by FOSS of Padua, Italy, moves beyond single-phase architecture. Now the sample stream is split into the liquid NIR, used as before for all other determinations, and an equilibrium gas phase methodology based on the FTIR principle that allows determination of free and total sulfur dioxide. The acidified sample is sparged, analogous to the aeration/oxidation method, but it is not trapped by H2 , and instead the gas phase sulfite determination turns out to have been no easy add-on, requiring a completely different principle and hardware. The new WineScan SO2 , released this 2 Barrel Washers • 4 Barrel Washers Barrel Processing Lines • 1/2 Ton Bin Washing Systems 35 lb. Picking Lug Washers • Custom Cellar Equipment Tom Beard Company 1650 Almar Parkway, Santa Rosa, CA 95403 P. 707-573-3150 F. 707-573-3140 www.tombeard.com 58 Wines & Vines FeBRUARY 2012 E. jmendoza@tombeard.com Wines & Vines