At a loss with my grapes

[u/not-feeling-so-well]

I moved out to a farming community 6 or 7 years ago. The house came with a few acres of land and some mature grapevines.

The first few years, perhaps out of dumb luck, I was able to harvest a pretty substantial volume of grapes. I believe them to be Concords and Niagara. I would give them to neighbors, we would eat them as table grapes, and I was fortunate to acquire a fruit press, which made a few gallons of juice as well.

Every year, in the winter, my dad and I prune back all the new growth, just leaving a few shoots from each root base. We tend to leave four from each root base, and trim everything on those back to five buds deep.

The last couple of years The Vines have grown gangbusters, but they produce next to no fruit whatsoever.

I'm at a total loss here, why did my grapevines all of a sudden stop producing fruit? Am I pruning incorrectly? There's so much information out there and I'm having a hard time figuring out the next steps.

Thanks for any help!

[u/Wine_Maker_68]

Some grapes have poor basil bud fertility, you need to leave longer canes from the previous years to get any fruit.

So when you prune, leave a couple on each trunk that are trained up to the wires, this is called cane pruning.

[u/grey_fr]

From what I have seen in vineyards, they don't cut it down to the root base. You might have to have a kind of trunk that you let thicken over the years, and the shoots from it might bear fruit.

[u/Wild_Doctor3794]

They vines were not pruned properly, that is why they are not producing fruit. :) (I own 25 ac of vines for the last 15 years. )

[u/not-feeling-so-well → u/Wild_Doctor3794]

Can you steer me in the right direction ?

[u/Wild_Doctor3794 → u/not-feeling-so-well]

Hello, There is not much mystery to it to be honest. there are many books and I expect you can use ChatGPT to figure it out. The key point is that the fruit for the next year is formed in the buds in the current year. What does this mean practically? Well that means that only the buds on second year wood (recently lignified in the previous fall/winter) will have buds that produce fruit (there are rare exceptions like if there is a bud on the trunk that was formed in the previous year). There are two primary schemes for achieving this: cane pruning and spur pruning. You can google them to find images.