Design and technical advice
One of the very first examples of cultivation "out-soil" of the vine is probably due to 240 BC. when, under the reign of Hieron II of Syracuse in Sicily, a boat was built in honor of the king with a garden of oriental beauty with paths and pergolas of vines grown in vats, as reported by a 1926 article by the historic French Gothein ML. Even historians and artists of ancient Rome, report and describe the vine pergolas in the Roman terraces, inspired by the same "model" of the kingdom of Magna Grecia.
The hypothesis of breeding the vine in the absence of agricultural land is therefore not recently formulated and has always aroused fascination among those who have had the opportunity to cultivate it; bearing witness to the ancient roots of this cultivation technique for ornamental and production purposes there are also the experiences reported by some authors dating back to the end of the 19th century who agree that the vine thus cultivated, entered faster in production than the traditional culture in land.
In England, for example, next to the cultivation of table vines under glass greenhouses, the practice of forcing into containers spread: the advantage of this technique consisted in the power to easily replace less productive plants or those whose flowering had not given good outcome; the forcing allowed very young plants to produce, in only six months, up to 6-8 clusters, anticipating notably the fruiting of the vines compared to the time required by traditional cultivation under the greenhouse. The only negative aspect was that not all vines fit well with this type of cultivation (Foex G., 1891).
In the same period, in many areas of central and northern Europe, the cultivation of vines in pots for ornamentation of the balconies spread. In Bilbao, Spain, as in many French homes, it was customary to admire balconies adorned with vine pergolas raised in boxes and loaded with grapes.
Ottavi in 1893 reports the interview of Mr. D. M. Aranguren of Bilbao describing the techniques with which he obtains bunches of "remarkable beauty".
Ottavi also reports the techniques to anticipate the ripening of the bunches and sell them at high prices as first fruits and on how to favor the enlargement of the bunches; it also mentions the forced cultivation of the vines carried by bringing the vases in greenhouses or using the aid of the stoves.
Professor Longo in one of his articles published in July 1926 for "the agricultural Italy", states: "... the cultivation of grapes in pots could feed a small industry, as is practiced for some fruit plants, with the advantage that the vine it lends itself to giving a better and greater product and that a beautiful vase full of bunches gives greater vagueness and satisfaction ... "; the author therefore exalts the greater productivity, constancy, abundance and quality of the grapes. Describes the vines that are most suitable for growing in pots, suitable containers, green pruning techniques and irrigation and fertilization that have given the best results.
It also reports news about an ad hoc plant, perhaps the first in Italy, made in 1925 by an Italian Society for the production of food grapes in the Agro Romano, the "Parvus Ager" Rome, which put on the market a few thousand years. of vine pots with grapes for ornamental purposes.
The evolution of production systems in the agricultural field and the introduction of fertigation have undoubtedly revolutionized traditional cultivation techniques also in the table grapes sector, increasing the degree of complexity of the plants:
The cultivation of table grapes outside the ground is not, as we have seen, a revisitation of the ancient cultivation techniques of the potted vine.
From vegetative multiplication to green cultivation interventions, from the processing of the bunch to the possibility of forcing the vines to produce at different times from the ordinary, it is in any case concepts developed in a surprising way for some time.
Different applications of this cultivation technique occurred in the twentieth century in genetic improvement programs in order to obtain plants free from virosis, accelerate the fructification of new crossings, overcome the juvenile phase of plants coming from in vitro cultures and in selection protocols clonal as evidenced by some works described by Fregoni (1985) and by Boubals et al., (1986).
Boubals emphasized the ease of working with foot-bred plants bred on rock wool, and also saw the opportunity to get two harvests a year under greenhouse using early cultivars. The plants in a container were made to temporarily freeze the soil to enhance its vigor and so to feed, with a nutritive solution, a part of the root system, thus accelerating the development of the fruit: the results were according to the authors far superior to those obtained from the unprocessed plant to the ground.
The training and production protocol of off-table vine plants has been described for the first time by French and New Zealand researchers around the second half of the 1990s.
In the first years of the XXI century, an intense research activity began in Sicily, centered on the cultivation of table grapes outside the greenhouse, conducted by the scientific staff of prof. Rosario Di Lorenzo of the University of Palermo with financial and technical support from the Sicilian Region.
The French researchers Vidaud and Landry of the center of Balandran CTFIL and (1991; 1994) focused their studies on the possibility of carrying out one or more production cycles and obtaining two collections in the same year, starting, for the second production cycle, from refrigerated-conserved plants.
Studies almost contemporary to those conducted by the French who validated the application of the technique of out of the ground to obtain a quality production and make more efficient the greenhouse space, were conducted by the New Zealand research center Levin (Kingston et Van Epenhuijsen 1995): during the winter the vine plants are left out to meet the needs in the cold and, only in the following spring, they are introduced into the greenhouse for the production cycle.
The results obtained in the early years made it possible to affirm that the vines grown soilless were, in the Mediterranean climatic conditions, able to guarantee good performances both in terms of quantity and production. In 2004 for the first time in the countryside of Vittoria, a company specializing in the cultivation of greenhouse table grapes produced 6 hectares of soilless vineyard; the company's need was to overcome the phenomena of soil fatigue much more pronounced in a protected environment.
The Sicilian experiences identified the adoption of the soilless table grapes with new opportunities to make the table grape sector more flexible and dynamic.