Tomorrow is the first day of the 2008 vintage. We are going to be picking some chardonnay to make a base wine for a kosher sparkling wine. To our knowledge this is going to be the first kosher sparkling produced in South Africa to date, which is quite cool. Talking about cool, in the temperature sense, we are going to start harvesting at a bright and breezy 4am tomorrow morning. At 4am it is still dark, so the pickers are going to be armed with camping headlights to illuminate the way. Starting that early allows us to get the majority of the fruit into the cellar whilst it is still cool, which is great for wine quality. We also use far less energy in the cellar since we don't need to cool down the grapes. Whilst for the pickers getting up to start work at 4am is a bit of mission it does mean that by midday, work is finished. So it's a win win win.
SB
2 comments:
Interesting. Exactly what are you doing to make this wine Kosher?
According to my friend Daniel Rogov, Israels leading wine writer, you need to leave vineyards fallow every 7th year and only "Sabbath observant male Jews are allowed to work on the production of the wines."
Isn't your winemaker a woman?
There are two versions of kosher wine, that which undergoes a flash pasteurisation process and that which hasn't. We make the former. In this case, anyone is allowed to pick the grapes, but once the skin of the grape has been broken only an observant jew is allowed to handle the process. Thus we have a mashgiah come out from the Beth Din (the Jewish Kosher food regulatory body) and basically he works and oversees the entire operation under the guidance of our winemaker.
Once the wine has been pasteurised, then anyone can handle the wine but only the supervision of the mashgiah.
If the wine is pasteurised then a non jew is allowed serving the wine (say in a restaurant) and it still remains kosher. In contrast, if the wine is not pastuerised then an observant jew has to serve the wine in order for it to be kosher.
SB
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