Supervising a Winery

A winery is the one food business where supervision cannot begin at the factory gate. It has to reach back into the vineyard, and in one respect back to the day the vines went in the ground.

The reason is that wine carries two separate sets of requirements at once — the handling rules, which govern who may touch it, and the agricultural mitzvos, which govern the fruit before anyone has touched anything.

Before the harvest: what the fruit has to clear

Orlah. The grapes must not come from orlah years, and that is not something you can determine by looking at them. It is supervised from planting. The practice is exacting: professional supervisors, often with a God-fearing agronomist, record a certificate for each plot, row and vine — the detail, timing and location of every seedling — so the orlah years are known rather than assumed.

Some certifying bodies require every grower selling to the winery to lodge approved planting maps at the winery office, stating the planting year. The mashgiach then checks the maps are genuine, and — this is the subtle part — that there are no infill plantings in the block. Only then is the vineyard released for harvest.

Infill is worth dwelling on, because it is the failure a paper system misses. A block planted in one year is straightforward. A block planted in one year with a dozen vines replaced four years later is a block containing two different orlah clocks, growing in rows, indistinguishable at harvest. The map tells you what was planted; the inspection tells you what is actually standing there.

Terumos, maasros and shevi'is apply to Israeli-grown fruit, and must be dealt with before processing if they have not been. Fruit grown outside the Land is exempt.

Kilei hakerem — grain or vegetable seed sown among the vines — is a Torah prohibition and has to be verified against.

The harvest is already part of the process

Most plants can treat receiving as the start of the supervised chain. A winery cannot, because grapes release juice on their own.

The concern is sharpest in mechanical harvesting, where grapes can begin running juice before they ever reach the winery — and once juice is running, a touch matters. So harvests are commonly accompanied by a mashgiach, with expert agronomists assessing the vineyards and the certifying rabbanus deciding where there is doubt.

Two practices deserve to be better known, because both are elegant solutions rather than restrictions.

The drilled bucket. Where the harvest is by hand and the pickers are not Jewish, the practice is to drill a hole in the bottom of every bucket, tub and container used to carry the grapes. Juice that collects cannot sit there, so it never becomes a pool that a touch could forbid. It costs nothing, changes no one's work, and removes the problem structurally rather than by watching for it.

Who drives the harvester. Where the harvest is mechanical, the operator is a God-fearing Jew — because a mechanical harvester crushes a great many grapes into its own tank as it goes. The machine is, in effect, doing the first pressing.

Some producers of expensive wines harvest by hand in any case, to avoid damaging the fruit. Where that is already your practice, the supervision question gets easier for free.

The moment the rule engages

This is the single most useful thing to know when designing a winery's supervision, because it tells you where to concentrate effort.

Wine or grape juice becomes subject to a non-Jew's handling from the point the juice begins to run and be drawn off the grapes — hamshacha. Before that point, it is not.

Two consequences, and they run in opposite directions:

• Before hamshacha, there is latitude. As long as no juice has run from the pips and skins, a touch does not forbid.
• After it, the exposure is total. If a non-Jew touches it, everything is forbidden. And it does not take contact with the liquid: touching the pips and skins alone forbids the whole lot, provided they are still moist enough to wet something else.

So the pomace is not a by-product for these purposes — it is live material. A plant that guards its tanks and treats its pressings casually has guarded the obvious half.

Who may handle it, and why the rule is drawn wide

From transporting the grapes to the winery through to the end of production and packing, those working with the wine are God-fearing, Torah-observant Jews.

That is broader than the strict prohibition requires, and the sources say so plainly. There are stages involving no act of libation whatsoever which the Sages nonetheless restricted — on the principle expressed as "go around, go around, we tell the nazirite; do not come near the vineyard."

It is worth naming that as a deliberate buffer rather than an unexplained stringency. The rule is set wider than the risk because the cost of a single lapse is the whole vessel, and because in a working winery nobody can reconstruct afterwards who touched what.

Insects, and what arrives with the fruit

A separate problem, and a practical one.

Grapes are checked for insects before production. Where infestation is such that cleaning is difficult or impossible, wine is not made from that fruit at all.

The structural issue is that wineries do not wash grapes before crushing and pressing. So where there is concern about insects, flies or maggots in the juice, it should not be drunk before straining.

And there is a second category that surprises people, arising specifically from bulk handling: lizards, spiders and frogs. When grapes are loaded in volume onto trucks in the vineyard, creatures common in vineyard soil come with them. The clusters need checking and supervising before they go into the crusher — which is a receiving-bay control, not a laboratory one.

What this means for a winery's programme

Three things follow that are worth designing around rather than discovering:

• Your records start in the vineyard. Planting maps, by block and year, with infill documented. This is the item with the longest lead time and the one nobody can reconstruct later.
• Harvest needs coverage, not just the cellar. Particularly a mechanical harvest, which is a pressing operation in a field.
• Staffing is the constraint. The handling requirement runs to packing, which makes it a recruitment and rostering question well before it is a halachic one.

For what happens to the finished bottle, see mevushal wine and the seal. These are general principles, not a ruling on your winery — the specifics belong with your certifying rav.