Blueprint of a Vineyard - Step by Step Part 1

Welcome to the Kosher Teruah. I'm Simon Jacob, your host for this episode from Jerusalem. Before we get started, no matter where you are, please take a moment to pray for the safe return home of all our soldiers, and the full return of all the remains of our hostages. If you're driving in your car, please focus on the road ahead. If you're relaxing at home, please open a delicious bottle of kosher wine and pour a glass, sit back and relax. Welcome back to The Kosher Terroir. In our last episode, we spent a lot of time in the dark, We walked through the cellar. We talked about barrels, fermentation, yeast, and the chemistry of turning juice into wine. And here's the dirty little secret about the cellar: it's a place of forgiveness. If a winemaker makes a mistake in the cellar— maybe the acid is too low, maybe the tannins are too aggressive— there are tools and toolbox to fix it. We can blend it away with a different barrel. We can micro-oxygenate it. We can filter. In the cellar, we are correcting. But today, today we are stepping out of the cave and into the sunlight. And out here in the vineyard, there is no forgiveness. Today we are talking about the blank canvas. Imagine standing on a hillside. There is nothing there but scrub brush, rocks, and dirt, and you're about to plant a vineyard. This is the moment where you stop being a farmer and you start being an architect, because the decisions you make at this phase, before a single root touches the soil, are permanent. If you plant the wrong clone, if you choose the wrong rootstock, if you orient your rows facing the wrong way, you cannot blend that mistake away. You're actually stuck with it for the life of the vineyard, which could be 25 years or more. In the wine world, we say you can make bad wine from good grapes, but you can never make good wine from bad grapes. Today we are going to learn how to ensure the grapes are good even before they exist. And for the kosher winemaker, the stakes are even higher. We have a biblical constraint called orlah. For the first 3 years of a vine's life, its fruit is forbidden. We cannot pick it, vinify it, and not even sell it. That means when you plant a vineyard, you are writing a check that won't see any returns on investment for a minimum of 4 years. You are building a factory that produces zero inventory for 1,400 days. So, you better get the architecture right. We have a lot to cover. We're going to look at the soil, the genetics, the trellising, the water. But first, we have to find the land. Let's put on our agronomist's hat. You want to make a world-class Cabernet Sauvignon, or maybe even a delicate Pinot Noir. Where do you put it? This brings us to decision number 1: the macro terroir. This is the big picture, the climate, the geography. If you look at the globe, wine has a Goldilocks zone. It generally falls between the 30th and 50th parallels north and south. Too close to the equator, the vine doesn't go dormant in winter. It burns out and dies. Too far north, the grapes never ripen. You end up with green, acidic juice. But here is where the science gets really interesting. We measure a site's potential using something called GDD, growing degree days. Basically, we are measuring heat accumulation. We take the average temperature on a single day during the growing season, usually April to October, subtract a baseline, usually 10°C or 50°F, because vines don't wake up below that, and we sum up those numbers. This gives us the Winkler scale. Region 1 is cool. Think Champagne, Germany, or the Finger Lakes. Low heat sum. Region 4 or 5 is hot. Think Central Valley, California, or the Negev Desert. Now, here is the trick, and this is crucial for Israel and many New World kosher wines. If you're in a hot country like Israel, you are geographically in a warm latitude. You are getting a lot of solar radiation. How do you make a high-quality, elegant wine in a pizza oven? You trade latitude for altitude. There's a rule of thumb in agronomy: for every 100 meters you climb vertically, the average temperature drops by about 0.6 degrees Celsius, or about 1 degree Fahrenheit. This is why you see the rush to the Judean Hills or the high Golan Heights If you plant at sea level in Israel, you're making jam—thick, syrupy wine. But if you go up 800 or 900 meters, you are chemically tricking the vine into thinking it's in France. You are buying yourself coolness. But temperature isn't just about the average. It's about the swing. We call this the diurnal shift. Imagine a grape as a battery. During the day, the sun charges it up with sugar. Photosynthesis is pumping sugar into the berry. But at night, the vine breathes. It consumes some of that energy. If the night is hot, like 25 degrees Celsius or 77 degrees Fahrenheit, the vine pants. It actually burns off its own acidity to stay alive. The resulting wine is flat and flabby. But if the temperature drops like a stone at night, it goes from 30 degrees C in the day down to 12 degrees, let's say, at night, the vine shuts down. It goes into a kind of refrigerator mode, preserving that precious acidity. So when you look for land, we aren't just looking for sun. We are looking for cold nights. That's the secret to wine complexity. Okay, so we found a region with the right heat summation. Now we are standing on the specific plot of land. Is it flat? Is it a hill? Which way is it facing? Let's talk about topography. In general, flatland is for accountants. Hillside land is for winemakers. Flatland is easy to farm. You can drive a tractor at 20 miles per hour. It's cheap. But hillsides, hillsides offer natural drainage, and vines hate wet feet. If water sits around the root, the vine gets lazy. It drinks too much. The berries get diluted. And you get rot. On the slope, gravity pulls the water away, but more importantly, the slope manages the air. Cold air is a liquid. It's heavier than warm air. At night, cold air flows downhill like water. If you plant on a valley floor, a bottom, that cold air pools there, and it creates two problems. In the spring, that pool of cold air will freeze your buds and kill the crop before it starts. Stagnant air breeds fungus. We want a slope so that the air keeps moving. Now let's look at the compass. This is called the aspect. If you're in the Northern Hemisphere, the sun is always in the southern sky. A south-facing slope is a solar panel. It catches the sun all day long. If you are planting Cabernet or Syrah and you want power, alcohol, and dark black fruit, you plant facing south. A north-facing slope is the cool side of the pillow. It looks away from the sun. 30 years ago, nobody wanted north-facing slopes. But today, with global warming, these are becoming the prized plots. If you want to make a crisp Sauvignon Blanc or a Chardonnay that doesn't taste like tropical fruit punch, you plant facing north. You're basically turning the volume down on the sun. Now, before we dig a hole to check the soil, there are two invisible hands we have to acknowledge. Wind and water. Wind is a double-edged sword. On one hand, wind is our natural fungicide. If you are near the coast or in a wind tunnel, that breeze dries out the bunches after rain. It prevents rot. It thickens the skins of the grapes, which gives it more color and structure. But if the wind is too strong, the vines shut down. Vines have tiny pores on their leaves called stomata. They breathe through them. If the wind is howling, the vine panics. It thinks it's going to dehydrate, so it slams those pores shut. Photosynthesis and ripening stops. There are vineyards in very windy corridors that simply stop ripening sugar at a certain point because they are too stressed by the gale. Now let's talk about proximity to water. Large bodies of water— the ocean, the Mediterranean, the Lake Kinneret— act as a heat sink. Water heats up slowly and cools down slowly. If you plant right next to the water, you get a moderating effect. You won't get the extreme scorching heat of the day, but you also won't get the freezing cold of the night. You get a steady, consistent ripening. That lessens the risk, but it also lessens the diurnal swing of temperature, which can make the wine much less complex. So we have chosen our site. We have found the southeast-facing slope to catch the morning sun but hide from the harsh afternoon heat. We are at 800 meters altitude for the cool nights. We have a gentle breeze. Now we need to look down. It's time to talk about the dirt. We are standing on our slope. We like the weather. Now, as we look down, to the average person It's just dirt. To the developer, it's a foundation for a house. But to us, it's the pantry. It's the pharmacy. It's the lens through which the vintage is focused. We need to break this down into two distinct categories: the physics of the soil, how it feels, and the chemistry of the soil, what it's made of. Let's start with the physics. The single most important rule in viticulture is this: vines hate wet feet. If you have a heavy, compacted soil that holds standing water, you are creating an anaerobic environment. Roots need oxygen just as much as they need water. If they sit in water, they suffocate. They get root rot. The vines die. But even if they don't die, a vine with endless water is a lazy vine. If the water is right there on the surface, the roots stay shallow. They won't dig. And the shallow root system is a disaster. It makes the vine susceptible to heat spikes, and it produces diluted, boring grapes. We want struggle. We want the soil to be rocky, gravelly, or sandy enough that the water drains away quickly. This forces the root system to go exploring. We want roots to grow down 5, 10, even 15 meters. Why? Because down there the temperature is constant and the water supply is steady. A vine with deep roots ignores a heat wave. A vine with shallow roots panics. So when you hear about gravel in Bordeaux, or schist, which is fractured slate, in Douro, or stony soils in the Golan, we aren't just talking about flavor. We're talking about architecture. Those rocks are essentially a drainage system that forces the roots to become marathon runners. Now let's get technical. Does the vine actually eat the rocks? If I plant a vine in a bed of lemons, will the wine taste like lemon? No. The vine takes up water and dissolves ions. That's it. However, the mineral composition of the soil fundamentally alters the metabolism of the grape. Let's look at 3 big players you'll find in top kosher terroirs. You hear this all the time: chalky soil makes high acid wine. Why? What is the mechanism? This is crucial for regions like the Judean Hills or Burgundy. Here's the science: grapevines love potassium. Potassium is like candy to them. When a vine sucks up potassium, that potassium binds with tartaric acid in the grape and neutralizes it. It lowers the acidity. Limestone is made of calcium. Calcium and potassium are antagonists. They fight for the same entry door into the root. If you have high calcium in the soil—limestone, to be exact—it blocks the uptake of potassium. Less potassium enters the vines, less acid is neutralized, more natural acidity stays in the wine. That's why limestone soils produce wines with that vibrating electric backbone. It's chemical interference at its best. In Israel, you often see terra rossa, that beautiful rusty red soil. It's red because of oxidized iron. Clay is the opposite of sand. It has tiny plate-like particles that stick together. It holds water. It stays cool. While limestone gives you the skeleton, the acid. Clay gives you the muscle. Clay soils tend to produce wines with broader shoulders, more body, and higher tannins. The classic Judean Hills profile is actually a mix: terra rossa topsoil for body over a limestone subsoil for acidity. It's the best of both worlds. Okay, now let's think about the Golan Heights. Or Mount Etna in Italy. Volcanic soil is often porous, kind of like a sponge. It drains incredibly well, but chemically it's high in iron and magnesium. There's a lot of debate about minerality here. Scientifically, we can't prove the salty taste comes from the rocks, but we observe that volcanic soil produces more savory wines. They feel nervous. They have tension. They often have a higher perceived salinity. But before we buy this land, I need to ask the lab for one more specific number, the CEC, or the Cation Exchange Capacity. Think of the soil as a pantry. The nutrients, magnesium, potassium, calcium, are the food in cans. The CEC measures how big the pantry is. Sand has a very low CEC. It's like a sieve. You pour nutrients in and they wash right out. You have to spoon-feed the vines consistently with fertilization. Clay and organic matter have a high CEC. They are negatively charged. So they hold onto their positively charged nutrients like magnets. They are a well-stocked pantry. As an agronomist, you need to know this. If I plant vigorous rootstock in a high CEC clay soil, I'm creating a monster. The vines will grow out of control. I need to match the engine to the fuel tank. So we've selected the land, we have analyzed the dirt. Now we have to choose the life we are going to plant in it. This is decision number 3, the genetic blueprint. To the average consumer, a bottle of wine says Cabernet Sauvignon, but to us, that's like saying a car is a Toyota. Okay, which one? Is it a Prius or a Land Cruiser? They're both Toyotas, but they do very different things. We need to understand that a grapevine is not one plant. It's a chimera. It's two different plants fused together. The top half, the part that grows leaves and fruit, is called the scion. The bottom half, the plant that goes into the ground is called the rootstock. Let's start with the bottom because that is the engine room. In the 1860s, the wine world nearly ended. A tiny aphid called phylloxera hitched a ride on a steamship from America to Europe. It attacked the roots of European vines, Vitis vinifera. It sucked them dry, injected toxins, and they rotted away. Within 30 years, nearly every vineyard in France was dead. The solution was found in America. American wild vines, Vitis riparia and Vitis rupestris, had evolved with the bug. They were immune. So we learned to graft. We take the tasty European top and welded onto the tough American bottom. But today we don't just use rootstock for protection, we use them for control. Think of rootstock as the transmission of a car. Let's say we're planting in the Negev, or a hot, dry pocket of the Galilee. There is no water, the sun is brutal. I'm going to call the nursery and order Paulson 1103. This rootstock is a beast. Its roots don't just go down, they drill. They are drought resistant and high vigor. If I plant this, I am telling the vine, go find water at any cost. Remember we talked about that white chalky soil? The problem with chalk is that it locks up iron. Vines get chlorosis. They turn yellow and can't photosynthesize. Most rootstock die in pure chalk. So you order 41B. This is the classic rootstock of Champagne. It has high tolerance for active limestone. It's like giving the vine an iron supplement. So what if you have deep fertile, rich soil. If I plant a vigorous rootstock, the vine will go crazy. It will grow a jungle of leaves and give me watery green fruit. I need to slow it down, so I order SO4. This rootstock has a shallow root system. It devigorates the vine. It tells the scion Hey, calm down. Stop growing leaves. Focus on the fruit. So before we even talk about the grape variety, we have already engineered how the plant eats and drinks. Now let's look at the top part of the plant, the fruit. You want to plant Cabernet Sauvignon? Great. But which Cabernet? This brings us to colonial selection. Over centuries, vines mutate. One vine might have smaller berries, one might ripen a week earlier. We cut the bud from the specific vine, propagate it, and give it a number. Let's look at two famous examples that define the taste of modern wine. If you drink a high-end Burgundy or a top kosher Pinot from the Judean Hills, you you are likely tasting a blend of two specific numbers: 777 and 115. Clone 777 is the showstopper. It produces tiny berries, deep and dark in color, with intense aromatics of black cherry and spice. It's a loud, sexy clone. Clone 115 is the backbone. It's more structural, it has better acidity, it's not as flashy, but it makes a wine age-worthy. The winemaker's choice: if I plant 100% clone 777, the wine might be too heavy, almost like Syrah. If I plant 100% clone 115, it might be a bit stern. So I plant 60% of one and 40% of the other. I'm blending the wines in the field. In Napa Valley and the Galilee, the battle is often between Clone 7 and Clone 337. Clone 7 is the classic. It's the old guard. It gives you that herbal green pepper, strict Cabernet profile. It yields heavy crops. Clone 337, on the other hand, is the New World darling. It comes from Bordeaux, but in warm climates it shines. It ripens earlier. It has lower pyrazines, that green bell pepper taste. It makes lush, fruit-forward, chocolatey wine. But as always, there's a trade-off. Clone 337 is delicate. Delicious, but it's a wimp. It gets viruses easily. Clone 7 is a tank, but it can be boring. So, do you see the architecture forming? We took a south-facing slope for sun. We found rocky soil for drainage. We chose rootstock 1103P. To dig deep into those rocks, and we grafted Cabernet clone 337 on top to get lush, fruity wine. We have built a machine designed to produce a specific flavor profile. We have our clone, we have our rootstock, we have our dirt. But if we just dig a hole and plant that vine, it's going to behave like a weed. It will crawl along the ground, and it will get rot and it'll be a mess. We need to build the skeleton. This is vineyard architecture, and this is where we make the decisions about geometry. First, which way did the rows point? If you look at a satellite map of a vineyard, you see lines. The direction of those lines matters. North-south rows, This is the gold standard. Why? Because the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. With north-south rows, the sun hits the east side of the canopy in the morning, warming the grapes up. At noon, the sun is directly overhead, hitting the leaves and not the fruit. In the afternoon, it hits the west side. This causes even ripening. Every grape gets the same amount of light. If you plant east-west rows, you create a south side and a north side to every row. The south side gets blasted by sun all day, and the north side is in permanent shadow. You end up with one side of the row giving you jammy wines and the other side giving you green wines. We generally avoid this unless the slope is so steep We have no other choice. Okay, so let's talk about social distancing and the density of the vines. How close do we plant them? In a place like Burgundy, they plant 10,000 vines per hectare. The vines are 1 meter apart. Why, you ask? Competition. When vines are packed that tight, the roots panic. They bump into their neighbors immediately, so they have only one place to go, and that's down. This forces deep rooting. It creates smaller berries and higher quality, but you can't fit a tractor in between them. You have to use a horse, or you have to use very expensive manual farming. In many Israeli and Californian vineyards, they plant 2,200 vines per hectare. They leave 3 meters between rows in order to allow big John Deere tractors to drive through. It's efficient and it's cheaper, but the roots can get very lazy because they have so much horizontal space. So now let's talk about the shape of the vine itself. We train the wood into specific shapes. 90% of the world uses VSP, or what's called vertical shoot positioning. You plant the vine, you put a stake next to it, and you run wires horizontally along the row. As the vine grows, you force the shoots upward onto the wire. The result is a hedge or a fruit wall. The pros: it's organized, the fruit is exactly the same height, perfect for machine harvesting, it's easy to spray. The cons: in a hot climate like in the Judean foothills or the Negev, VSP is dangerous. You're creating a wall that faces the sun. If you aren't careful, you expose the fruit to sunburn. In the hottest, windiest places—think of the Southern Rhône, Châteauneuf-du-Pape, or old-vine Zinfandel in California, or ancient plots in Israel—they don't use wires at all. They use the goblet system. This is also known as bush vines. They prune the trunk short, close to the ground. They allow the shoots to grow out in a circle, like the spokes of a wheel. As the shoots grow heavy with leaves, they flop over. They create a natural umbrella or nest shape. The fruit hangs inside this nest. The grapes are completely shaded by their own leaves. They are protected from the white-hot sun, and they're also protected from the wind. It creates a microclimate inside the cup. It retains humidity, and this is how you can grow Grenache, Carignan, and Syrah in the desert without them turning to raisins. It's ancient technology, but it works. Sometimes you have a problem. The soil is too good. You plant Cabernet in rich, deep soil, the vine is exploding with energy. If you use the VSP trellis, the canopy gets so thick and dense that the fruit rots inside. So they use a split canopy. Imagine the letter Y. They install a trellis with two arms spreading out. They train half the shoots to the left and half the shoots to the right. We are basically spreading the solar panels out. We are opening the center to air and light, and we are using the vine's excess energy to ripen a larger crop load, keeping the balance in check. So if you're walking through a vineyard and you see a neat wall of green VSP, you know that you're looking at a modern, likely mechanized farm. If you see a gnarly, messy-looking stump on the ground with no wires, the goblet, you are likely looking at a heat-loving variety built for survival. The architecture tells you the story of the climate, and once you have built the skeleton, we have to manage the skin, the leaves. This is Simon Jacob again, your host of today's episode of The Kosher Teruah. Please listen in again next week for part 2 of our episode on vineyard creation. Please subscribe via your podcast provider to be informed of our new episodes as they are released. If you are new to The Kosher Teruah, please check out our many past episodes.