It is entirely possible to plant the right grape in the wrong place and end up with a wine that lacks the quality to be a great wine, while only a few hundred yards away in fallow land may lie the perfect site.

The next step is to decide how much wine you what to produce from this site. There are many ways to do this; vine spacing is probably the most common. If you space your vines 6 feet apart and your rows 10 feet wide you will have 650 vines per acre and if each vine produces 8-12 pounds of grapes (about one gallon of juice) you will have 650-times-5 bottles (each gallon is equivalent to 5 bottles of wine). That amounts to 3,250 bottles of wine. That's also where the term a fifth came from.

As we recently learned if you grow the maximum amount of fruit on each vine the quality will be reduced, due to uneven ripening. So before the grapes ripen we need to remove as much as half of the developing fruit to ensure that the rest of the fruit will ripen evenly and maintain a higher quality.

Now that we know the type of grape we want to grow and how much wine we want to make, let's find out what kind of soil, slope and elevation our vineyard site should have.

We will need to consider several different factors: solar orientation (direction the sun rises on your vineyard), slope, solar radiation, frost and heat pockets, wind, depth of soil, drainage and surrounding growth.

Sloping land is the best, in cooler areas southeast and southwest facing property is best in warmer areas northeast and northwest works best. The top third of the vineyard will produce the best grapes.

Soil type is very important for the development of the vine. The type of soil that grapes grow well in is one of the following or a combination of the following soil types - sandy, gravelly loam, well drained clay, limestone. As you can see vines don't like the nutrient-rich soils that are usually found in valleys but prefer the hillside slopes were erosion has occurred.