Agricultural Water Management 148 (2015) 269–279 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Agricultural Water Management jou rn al hom ep age: www.elsevier.com/locate/agwat Response of grapevine cv. Syrah to irrigation frequency and water distribution pattern in a clay soil Bárbara Sebastian ∗,1 , Pilar Baeza 1 , Luis G. Santesteban 1 , Patricia Sanchez de Miguel 1 , Mario De La Fuente 1 , José R. Lissarrague 1 Grupo de Investigación en Viticultura, Departamento de Producción Vegetal: Fitotecnia, Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingenieros Agrónomos, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, C/Senda del Rey s/n, 28040 Madrid, Espa˜ na a r t i c l e i n f o Article history: Received 1 April 2014 Accepted 21 October 2014 Available online 9 November 2014 Keywords: Drip irrigation Grapevine Biomass Yield Water potential Vitis vinifera L. a b s t r a c t Water availability is one of the major factors that determine vineyard performance in many grape growing regions, so its implications have been widely studied before. However, for a given irrigation water amount, other aspects such as application frequency, or emitter spacing and flow rate (i.e., distribution pattern), may play a relevant role, but these factors have been scarcely studied. The aim of this work was to evaluate the agronomic implications of two irrigation frequencies (IrrF, every 2 and 4 days) and two water distribution patterns (DisP, 2 L h -1 emitters every 0.6 m vs. 4 L h -1 emitters every 1.2 m). The experiment was carried out during four consecutive seasons in a cv. Syrah vineyard with a clay soil in central Spain, and the two factors were evaluated under two water availability conditions (low and medium). IrrF and DisP promoted changes in water status that affected some aspects of vegetative development and yield components under both water availability conditions, although the effects observed were not the same every year. Berry size was the most sensitive parameter to changes in IrrF and DisP. The effects were more evident under low water availability. Soil texture has certainly conditioned the results obtained, since high frequency irrigation implied applying small amounts of water that resulted in limited superficial water bulbs, which probably favored water evaporation. © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Water management is a key issue in many wine grape produc- tion areas, particularly where the evaporative demand outcomes the amount of water available during the growing season. More- over, the warming trend during the growing season experienced in the majority of the world’s high quality wine-producing regions in the last fifty years (Jones et al., 2005a,b) has lead viticulturists to evaluate the effect of different water availability levels in zones such as Bordeaux (Van Leeuwen et al., 2009) or Switzerland (Spring and Zufferey, 2009), where irrigation is not yet a conventional practice. Water management is particularly critical in regions, such as Central Spain, where the amount of available water during the growing season is extremely lower than the evaporative demand, as rainfall in summer is scarce or negligible, and water reserves in ∗ Corresponding author. E-mail address: barbara.sebastian@viticulturaintegral.com (B. Sebastian). 1 All the authors have contributed significantly and agree with the content of the manuscript. the soil profile are not enough to meet grapevine needs. Irrigation is therefore essential in those regions in order to achieve yields that make grape growing profitable and, as a consequence, a vast corpus of research has lately evaluated how it affects yield, grape, and wine quality for different varieties in semi-arid areas either focusing on comparing different amounts of irrigation water and/or water availability levels across the season (Kliewer et al., 1983; Stevens et al., 1995), or on analyzing the effects of water deficit at certain stages of berry development (Poni et al., 1993; Ginestar et al., 1998; Ojeda et al., 2002; Petrie et al., 2004; Salon et al., 2005; Bowen et al., 2011; Intrigliolo and Castel, 2010; Santesteban et al., 2011; Junquera et al., 2012). However, quite surprisingly, other irrigation- related factors such as irrigation frequency, emitter spacing and flow rate have been scarcely studied, despite a relevant effect has been observed for annual (Goldberg and Shmueli, 1970; Freeman et al., 1976; Segal et al., 2000; Sharmasarkar et al., 2001; Ertek et al., 2004; Sensoy et al., 2007; El-Hendawy et al., 2008) and for other perennial crops such as apple (Levin et al., 1979), olive (Palomo et al., 2002) and almond (Andreu et al., 1997). Concerning irrigation frequency, Goldberg et al. (1971a) and Myburgh (2012), when working in drip-irrigated table grapes grown in sandy soils, reported that the more frequent irrigation http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.agwat.2014.10.017 0378-3774/© 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.