This is what we call grafting, or working over, our top working a vine. There is different words that could be used. But essentially they took this vines, that was a variety that was undesirable, and cut off the fruiting part of that, in this case cordons.
The approximate time for budding over, would be April or May depending on the weather and they cut this, the top part of the vines off, and then they go ahead and then insert a bud from the variety that they want to graft onto these establish trunks.
This little chip that I have in my hand represents what was removed from this trunk, so that way, the bud is slip in, offer the door cane, for the desired variety, and this is the back side of it, or the side that would been under the bark like this, but anyway this is the part that was removed, so that way the bud has slip in into that bark area. The new but it slip in into the bark area and it could be anywhere along if the trunk has got, a fairly flat and straight surface on it. We won’t wanna do it where there's already an internodes or something like that but where the truck is fairly flat and up it takes about two or three weeks for it to heal and maybe three to four weeks from the time is crafted before we start to see any growth come out at that bud for success.
In this here is a sucker growth, what we call a sucker growth, and all this will have to be removed at some point, but it is the encouragement of changing the variety from what was here to a new variety and getting this vine to grow.
By doing this operation, they essentially lose, without all the redevelopment costs of new training wires and new training in all of that. They essentially lose a crop and a half, now in other words, they lost the crop for this year, the year grafting, and approximately half the crop for the next year, and then they're back in the business.
The advantage is, they didn’t have. The advantage is, that if the vines where healthy and disease free, and not known viruses in them, or anything like that, they can do this successfully and year going back into cropping within a year and a half, of the desired variety that they have. The disadvantage, and why you wouldn't do this, it's that the original vine had some sort of a disease, such as leaf rolled virus or a farily thinning, would be no advantage to grafting over.