Savoring the Spirit of Innovation: A Winemakers Voyage with Mosaic Cellars

S. Simon Jacob: 0:09

Welcome to the Coucher Terroir. I'm Simon Jacob, your host for this episode from Jerusalem. Before we get started, I ask that, wherever you are, please take a moment and pray for the safety of our soldiers and the safe return of all of our hostages. The following is a conversation with two very bright young wine entrepreneurs, Eliyahu Margulis and his partner Tzvi Zucker, the owners and winemakers for mosaic sellers. They are both originally from the United States and now live, with their wives and children, in the northern Israeli community of Dolev, where their winery is located. They are both exceedingly driven by the desire to produce wine, but even more so to create premium wines for the sophisticated wine consumer. Please listen in and join me in learning from their interesting journey towards fulfillment of their ultimate wine dream. Okay, welcome to The Kosher Terroir. I'd like to welcome Eliyahu and Tzvi from Mosaic Cellars. Love to have you. It's a pleasure to have you on the podcast.

Eliyahu Margulis: 1:26

Thank you for having us. Okay, really a pleasure.

S. Simon Jacob: 1:29

We're going to talk a little bit and we're going to taste some of your wines and go from there Absolutely All right. So tell me, where did this dream start? Where did you start with your interest in wines?

Eliyahu Margulis: 1:45

I mean our interests from wine probably start individually, but it started mostly on a road trip down to a lot where I ended up burning half my hand off in a fire while we were trying to camp out in the desert. But on that road trip we kind of this idea was birthed to make wine. We wanted to bring a different and unique approach to wine, and that kind of brings us to how Mosaic was born. Mosaic Cellars is an idea to make wine for the connoisseur. It's wine that is unique both in flavor profile and in the methodology by which the wine is made, trying to make something that isn't the same wine that you see always on the shelf. You go into any winery, as Tsv'i would put it.

Tzvi Zucker: 2:41

When you go into a wine store, each shelf is more in common than it has differences. So French Cabernet is a French Cabernet, an American Oak Chardonnay is an American Oak Chardonnay Wine is commoditized. There are legal definitions in many. If you grow wine in a certain area in Italy, it must be made in a certain way, with certain materials. County is only made in a certain way.

S. Simon Jacob: 3:02

It's 100%.

Tzvi Zucker: 3:03

They'll see. So what winds up happening, though, is for people who are looking to push the limits of their palate. People are looking for that different experience, whether it's to understand how wine is made, or even if it's just hey, if you do this, this happens. You don't find that on the shelf we were. I've been doing this since I was 21, where, any chance I had, I'd go to as many wineries as I could and ask as many questions as I could. There was something really cool about I don't know having somebody who has a vision ahead of time as to what an outcome would be, and going through a process and creating it, and so what we wanted to do was the anti-commodity in a way to do something, an independent variable that a connoisseur can taste, and you may not have to like it, but you will definitely appreciate it, because here's something that enriches your understanding of how wine is made or what the effects of a certain change in a certain part of the process would be.

S. Simon Jacob: 4:11

Interesting. So how did you feel like you wanted to implement that?

Eliyahu Margulis: 4:17

So we started looking at different things. The first and most obvious way is the varietal of the grape, the zan. You can go into Zanim the varietals that don't particularly exist in the Israeli market. We have the same Cabernet Sauvignon and Syrah and Merlot, the Noble Six and the Noble Six, and then throw in Kareenian here in Israel and we're starting to see more and more different varietals. There's a big explosion in the market but even still there's still, I would say, the commoditized versions. Right, malbec's coming up, and Petit Verdeau and Pinot Noir and Petit Syrah. A little bit Cabernet Frank is found in unique locations.

Tzvi Zucker: 5:02

And it's worth telling the story.

Eliyahu Margulis: 5:05

What about the Cabernet Frank the?

Tzvi Zucker: 5:07

Shemitah wine that we brought is a Cabernet Frank and there's so little of it in the country that there's a Shiloh Cabernet Frank and we realized I had to be the same vineyard and it was.

Eliyahu Margulis: 5:20

And it was.

Tzvi Zucker: 5:21

Because there really is not that many vineyards that are growing it.

S. Simon Jacob: 5:24

There are a few. There are a few, no, actually, you know, most of them are going into blends, though. Cabernet Frank is the parent of Cabernet and Merlot, so it's kind of unusual.

Eliyahu Margulis: 5:36

A mix of Cabernet Frank and Sauvignon Blanc gives you Cabernet Sauvignon.

Eliyahu Margulis: 5:42

So, taking those different varietals unique varietals, there's ones that don't exist in the country, there are ones that are unique to Greece or the ones that are unique to Hungary or to other parts of Europe that don't exist here. There also is a unique and upcoming market in the we'll call them ancient or and the wine, natural wines of Israel. So Rickonati's putting out wine like that. Gvaot is obviously putting out wine like that. They're going back and collecting the DNA samples of the seeds from the Beytah Miktashtin, comparing that to the Zanim that are growing in the Arab Khaffarim in Israel. Batuni is one of them.

Eliyahu Margulis: 6:24

Jandali, merawi are all examples of that. So there's the avenue of the varietal and then there's also the methodology in that. So different wineries do different things. If you look at Beytel winery, they raise in their wines right. So, drawing on certain aspects of the practice of making wine natural fermentation, unfiltered wines first press, free run all these kinds of things that are wineries do it. They do it as a unique run and the idea of our wine is all of that is to experiment and push the envelope of winemaking but still produce it at a high level.

S. Simon Jacob: 7:11

Very cool, very cool. So what do you want to try first? So we're going to taste what.

Eliyahu Margulis: 7:17

We'll start with the rosé and then I'll pop the red open so that it can start breathing. You could see that we, in our higher end wines, we wax the cork and then we imprint.

Tzvi Zucker: 7:32

So if you want to explain, this is actually a seal from Sasane and Iran. It's a time and place of the Gamara, it's its vi, which is why it appealed to me. It's a nice aesthetic touch While I was opening that this is our rosé from 2023. The vines are old vines. They're 25 years old. They grow in Givatada, which is near Zikronyako Benjamin area. Because they are old vines they're kind of pushing their last. Specific gravity that they were providing was pretty low.

Tzvi Zucker: 8:15

The wine here is only 10.5% alcohol, about the minimum that it'll.

Tzvi Zucker: 8:20

It won't spoil without fortification or sugar or the like. What we did that's, I guess, a little different with the rosé is two things One, that it was fermented over oak, so we wanted to give it a bit more tannins than it would have otherwise, and the other is we used red wine yeast and part of that is for color. The color is pretty rich, for I mean, the skins were in contact with this for 15, 20 minutes and part of that is also for the flavor profile to bring out as much of the red grape. Of the grapes that we used, it's a San Giovese, as I mentioned, it's a red grape and so hopefully we'll find out if it comes through on the flavor as you experience it. But the idea was to make a bit of a red-white, almost as a rosé, where you can still taste the like, the dominant flavors of the San Giovese grape, which in this instance should probably be like a strawberry cotton candy style of flavor or note, but also with, like a sense of body behind it.

S. Simon Jacob: 9:35

I'm certainly getting in the nose the strawberry cotton candy, which is really interesting.

Eliyahu Margulis: 9:43

And what's interesting is it can be drank like this, which is a little bit cooler than room temperature right now because it's a bit colder, it's winter but you crisp that up in the freezer for a half hour, 20 minutes before drinking it and it's a completely more citrusy flavor profile which is really, really, really unique for and with this color, is just a joy to drink on a hot day, on a Shabbat afternoon. So this is unfiltered and it's free run. So again, try to take this red grape and manipulate it in a little bit more of a unique way. There's not a lot of rosés on the market that are this robust in almost a red one. It's a wine characteristic to the structure of the wine, while retaining this kind of clarity and fruitiness and lightness to it as well.

S. Simon Jacob: 10:40

When you said, oak you mean in a barrel or with oak chips.

Eliyahu Margulis: 10:44

So this is done with oak chips Because it was fermented with the oak chips. So the oak chips have been there from the very very very beginning.

S. Simon Jacob: 10:55

So it does have, Because when you ferment in oak one of the things that's interesting, that I never knew but if you ferment in oak, in oak barrels, you don't get the oak from the barrels. What you get is the micro oxidization, but you don't necessarily.

Eliyahu Margulis: 11:13

You don't get the vanilla that's in oak.

S. Simon Jacob: 11:15

Yeah, that comes in the oak barrels. That's why I was wondering how Wait a minute. You've fermented it in oak. What oak did you do so?

Eliyahu Margulis: 11:22

that's what was. We did wood chips, yeah, and so we also put out a blend. This year we did a young version and one that's currently aging. So the young version was aged with oak wood chips for two months and that, you know, miraculously sold out within the first day. And we called it young, wild and free because it was young, as I said, two months aged. Wild because it was wild fermentation. We took the grapes, a blend of grapes from Merlot, grapes from Shuva, down south, which is Under fire Under fire.

Eliyahu Margulis: 12:01

I've spoken to the grower down there, rahimim, and you know he's already gung-ho for the next season, and what's unique about that Merlot that he grows is he planted it in 2014 under the last war, under the rockets, and now this was picked right before, you know, a couple weeks before the war started here. So we're really hoping to again go after his Merlot, which came out with this beautiful creamy consistency and flavor profile to it, and it's 25% Merlot and 75% Syrah, and the Syrah comes also from Givat Adda, and so it's young, wild and free, free being also free run. So it's really light, young. It's already developed some body, but it's young, light, fruity, great kind of you know light red wine to drink on. It can pair as well with you know light fishes and chickens, but also can be, you know, paired well with a meat. And then we're doing that same blend, but we're aging it over oak and that will be 12, probably 12 months aged.

S. Simon Jacob: 13:12

When you're saying it aged over oak again, it's in, it's wood chips, yeah, yeah yeah, you're not barreling stuff.

Eliyahu Margulis: 13:20

We will be in this upcoming season, we will be starting into barrel as we get into higher quantities. Okay, our goal is 1000 bottles in 2024. Yep, and upwards and onwards from there, you know, slowly growing but methodically and strategically in terms of size, so that we can continue growing our operation. And you're making it in Dolev right now. Yeah, we're making it out into Dolev. Very cool. You know, we've set up a little bit of space in one of our backyards and turned that into kind of a wine operation. Very cool, yeah.

S. Simon Jacob: 13:56

It's actually really nice. It's very crisp, yeah, and the Sanjevice has a unique taste for what you call it for a rosé. Yeah, and you know they make them.

Tzvi Zucker: 14:15

Dry Sanjevices are a thing in Italy, yeah, but I've never seen a kosher one yet, not from Italy.

S. Simon Jacob: 14:21

Okay, I have. There's some. A rosé, not a rosé, oh yeah, there are. I have a close friend who's bringing in a lot of kosher wines from Italy now and it's really spectacular. His name is Ralph Madab, dr Madab, and he brings in some of the highest quality kosher wines in the world and they're coming out of Italy and it's pretty amazing, fantastic. So, yeah, he's really an awesome person. So this is delicious. This is really delicious, yeah.

Tzvi Zucker: 15:01

Thank you.

Eliyahu Margulis: 15:02

We're very proud of the rosé. I think it, you know, came out really, I think, even way better than we expected it. To be honest, like we thought we, when we put it together and we started fermenting and we were tasting and as we were, you know, making it, we were excited about it because it was turning out very well, but I think it came out significantly better than Now that it's especially out of bottle shock came out much, much better than we could have even imagined.

S. Simon Jacob: 15:30

It's tart, it's got. You know, you mentioned strawberries, but it's almost got apples as well. Yeah, you know, almost that. Granny smith, yeah, granny smith.

Eliyahu Margulis: 15:40

And crispiness, yeah Right, it's got a real crispiness, I think the strawberry, you know bubble gum comes out right on the nose, right at the tip. But as you get through that flavor profile it builds. Yeah, it has a really decent body and a good finish that lets you enjoy that wine in your mouth for a couple minutes after each sip. That you're not. You know you're going back for more, but it takes some time. The second bottle that we brought we were talking about is the Cabernet Franc. Okay, the Cabernet Franc is a Kdushet Shvit, it's a Schmitel wine.

S. Simon Jacob: 16:16

One second I just want to tell you about this. Yeah, One of the things that's interesting about this is it's really incredibly well structured. It's got you know, it really goes across your whole palate and it does have a nice long finish to it, which is not usual, and it's really pleasurable. So very cool.

Eliyahu Margulis: 16:38

Yeah, thank you very much. Okay, I, we're proud of it. I agree exactly with what you said. The Cabernet Franc that we brought, like I said, is Kdushet Shvit. It's a. It's a. It's Schmitel wine. Yeah, comes out from the Eishkodesh Shiloh area, the vineyards that are out of there. It was aged over oak wood chips and this is, we'll call it, a proof of concept for the winery.

Tzvi Zucker: 17:07

Okay, there were about 25 of these made.

S. Simon Jacob: 17:09

Yeah, that's it, that's it. You have to actually really speak into the mic. No, no, no, not not like yes, no A bit closer.

Tzvi Zucker: 17:17

Yeah, we only made about 25 of these in the end. We got very lucky that towards the end of the Shmitel season, once whatever was going to be Otser Besdyn was was cut. Whatever was left over was somebody's. You know the dollar carom sent out a Kolkhoi. It's Shemitah. Whoever wants it, come and get it. Yeah, so we drove down there and we hadn't really planned to do anything in 2022. When we started planning, it was always a 2023 in mind and I got a phone call from a friend who lived in Eishkodesh and he said you're not going to believe this, but they're grapes. I said what do you mean? They're grapes. He says if you come down to the vineyard, whatever's, whatever you can take, basically that's yours, it's yours. So I called Ilya and I was like what are you doing for the next couple of months? What are you doing for the next you know six hours? And he's like whatever he was planning on doing.

Tzvi Zucker: 18:06

I said nope, we're picking up a vineyard and we're going to pick grapes and basically, yeah, through sunset we harvested whatever we could and then did everything by hand. It was you mentioned earlier. You know, ellie from Castel. Just learning by doing this was our trial by fire. We had a ton of fun. We made a ton of mistakes. When we get into this, there's some cool things to see, but one of them is how much oxygen wound up in the wine at the beginning and then how it settled out by the end. We opened the same wine two different times, about four months apart, for the same person. The first time we drank it and he said, wow, this is terrible, what is this? It turned and then, four months later, he drank it again and said this is incredible. It's very complex. There are layers to this. It's very. What is this?

S. Simon Jacob: 19:07

Same wine yeah.

Tzvi Zucker: 19:12

So that was really the biggest lesson that we learned out of all of that. But it's our. It's our bikurin. In a way, it's our first fruits. We don't, we don't, obviously they're from Prometa. They're not for sale. We open them for, for, for cool people.

S. Simon Jacob: 19:30

And here we are. Thank you, thank you, wow, wow. I like being a cool person, but we've got actually new glasses. If you want to use those or if you're no, if you, if you finish that, you know I'm going to finish this and then you can just use this glass, yeah.

Eliyahu Margulis: 19:44

There's no need to dirty it up. We want Rose first.

S. Simon Jacob: 19:48

Okay, you want to wash it out with a rose anyway. So that's good, that's perfect, okay.

Eliyahu Margulis: 20:05

So it's it's uniquely rich in in color. It's really the skins on the on the Cabernet Franks that we ended up having were very deep.

Tzvi Zucker: 20:16

Very thick.

Eliyahu Margulis: 20:17

Very thick, very deep in, in, in, in, in color. And so this is. This is already, you know, sat in a bottle for almost a full year, not even, not, not quite a full year.

Tzvi Zucker: 20:35

There's long legs.

S. Simon Jacob: 20:36

Yeah, a lot of, a lot of viscosity.

Eliyahu Margulis: 20:41

It's got these deep, deep notes like gravel and dark cherries and, you know, mulberry, almost. It's got a nice balance, got nice acidity I think I would say acidity plus and a decent body and and and nice finish, I think it's. It's complex. I think as the wine opens it gets even more and more complex, really, really builds on its flavor. And I mean personally I'm I'm a big fan of Tannen and this is a we'll call it a Tannen bomb.

S. Simon Jacob: 21:33

I can tell you.

Tzvi Zucker: 21:35

I can tell yeah, there's never a problem that Leo won't solve by saying Edmore would Tannen.

S. Simon Jacob: 21:45

No, um, actually it's, it's. It's really interesting. I would love to see how this progresses. Yeah, you know, over over some time, this is going to um mellow out. Yeah.

Tzvi Zucker: 21:56

And it already has you know, four months ago.

Eliyahu Margulis: 22:00

So, like Tee was saying, this wine actually in no desire of ours from the beginning, but got oxygenated through the production process.

Tzvi Zucker: 22:13

How'd you?

S. Simon Jacob: 22:14

do that.

Tzvi Zucker: 22:15

Started off with a container that was too big yeah Gotcha and did not yet understand that a certain amount of kilograms of grapes doesn't always equal the same number in liters of wine, despite all the people saying that it does. So we wound up with considerably less than we thought we would, and just in the spirit of all right, well, keep going, you're not going to stop now.

Eliyahu Margulis: 22:42

Right, yeah, and it ended up being something absolutely beautiful, but it absolutely changed the way the wine progressed, the flavor profile that was developed and also the fermentation. Yeah, fermentation had a lot more oxygen than would normally be in a fermentation tank and I think it's created a unique wine and lesson learned that there's.

Tzvi Zucker: 23:05

It'll be the last one like this, we hope.

Eliyahu Margulis: 23:07

Maybe, but there is that pushing the boundaries. That's where it came from.

S. Simon Jacob: 23:15

Yeah, but it doesn't look like it's oxidized, it's not browned.

Tzvi Zucker: 23:18

That's not browned on the edges or anything.

S. Simon Jacob: 23:19

No, no, it's not oxidized. From that perspective, at all no, and it doesn't taste oxidized it tastes.

Tzvi Zucker: 23:24

Oxygenated might be a better word than oxidized, because a lot of oxygen went through it but it didn't stay in there. But part of how the fruit notes are that open, even though this wine is that young, is because it will. Well, I'm off the make again. Part of why the fruit notes are that open is because this Normally we add oxygen to wine, we open it, we let it breathe for an hour, but it did that. But if it's not churlier on in its process, then most wines will do. What I find interesting is no matter who we opened this for people with sophisticated palates or people who drink it Don't understand this wine yeah, everybody would take a sip and say, well, this is very complex.

Tzvi Zucker: 24:12

There's like a lot going on in here which was very interesting for us to see that that was a universal. Some people left it at that and some people started I'm getting a little bit of this and I'm feeling a little bit of that. The dryness is a little Well. At the time, when it was still young, this is very, very dry, it's overpowering, and now this is kind of mellowed into the wine as necessary. But it was something which was that everybody came back with, which was there's a lot going on here which for many connoisseurs was this is kind of like Ilya was saying which is our proof of concept, where somebody can look at something and say that's different, not in a good way, not in a bad way, just as a. That is what it is.

Eliyahu Margulis: 25:01

I'll tell you what my preferred bottle of wine. I go to the wine store. I really want a nice bottle of wine for Friday night. If I were to choose a red bottle of wine, I want that bottle of wine that I take a sip and then, five minutes later, I'm still thinking and I'm still chewing on that bottle of wine. That complexity At the pinnacle of red wine making for me is that complexity.

Eliyahu Margulis: 25:19

You sit and you have to think about the wine. You didn't just drink it to get drunk or just as a drink. I think there are wines that are perfect for that, are young, wild and free, is perfect for the rosé. Great, it's complex, you can drink it, but you can drink it lightly and keep drinking. You go back to a red wine that you sit at a dinner table with good meat and you think about that wine. Every sip matters. You're still thinking about it Five minutes after you've taken that one sip and oh, I have to go back and I really want and go through the structure of that wine. That's what the connoisseur does, that's what I want to see out of a red wine, always pushing in terms of that red wine into that direction.

S. Simon Jacob: 26:03

Very interesting, Very very interesting.

Eliyahu Margulis: 26:10

Because of the way we made it in the first one. There's still this herbaceous quality to it, a little bit that you get from a wine that didn't age too long, did not get too much oak flavor on it. This set, what was it? Five, six months, six months, over oak.

Tzvi Zucker: 26:28

Over oak chips. We also left in a lot of stems for the fermentation. That's right.

Eliyahu Margulis: 26:34

There's a very herbaceous quality to the wine.

S. Simon Jacob: 26:36

That also is not as prevalent in a lot of wines, but it's also not overpoweringly green. It's not. Sometimes wines like that can be really not desirable.

Tzvi Zucker: 26:51

They taste more like stems and grape.

S. Simon Jacob: 26:53

Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, it's very cool. So that's lovely. So where are you looking forward to?

Eliyahu Margulis: 27:07

Our future is bright. We were actually sitting down the other week talking about our plans for 2024 season, where we already know that there is going to be a single varietal.

S. Simon Jacob: 27:24

Well, wait, let's talk about 2023, because it made those, so those are coming down the pike, some of them are out, so what do you?

Eliyahu Margulis: 27:31

have. Yeah, so the rosé, half of it is sold. It went the first day half We've got about. We made about 120, 130 bottles. A hundred of them is what we're selling. The rest is archived or what we're giving for our own drinking and 50 have already sold. We made 40 young, wild and free bottles. These are the young blend of Syrah and Merlot that sold out. That sold out the first day.

Tzvi Zucker: 28:02

Then there's about another 150 bottles worth of the red that's still raging and that'll be ready probably around Rosh Hashanah, yom Kippur time, late 2023. 24. Sorry, yes, late, 24. Late 24. Very cool.

S. Simon Jacob: 28:23

And then four, and that's a combination of what?

Eliyahu Margulis: 28:25

again, that's the same blend as the young, wild and free.

Tzvi Zucker: 28:28

So that one actually on the label is a little Pasuk, which is a bit of a pun towards where it's from. Elieo mentioned 25% of it is Merlot from a Moshev called Shuvah and 75% of it is Syrah from Givat Adah. And once the Kuvei was mixed and I saw that it kind of reminded me of the Pasuk Shuvah, israel, ad Hashem, which is always written as Adah, because it's a hey and a and so kind of as a kind of a dvila and kind of as a little unifying theme for what the bottle wound of being.

Tzvi Zucker: 29:08

That's the top of the label over there, so it'll be bottled in the name Kuvei Sauvage Sauvage for the wild fermentation in Kuvei, because that's actually what it is. It was blended before aging and then coming down the pike. For 2024, we plan to try our hands in orange wine, using some Mascadella and Zandroni coming from also Givat Adah same vineyards. We're returning to the Syrah. It has wonderful acidity, it can age for a long time, it thrives there. We're coming back to that and we're also adding Petit Predot to the mix. We're still planning out exactly how that'll break down, if they'll both be single varietals, if we'll blend it, if we'll do all three, some of one, some of the other. But those are the ingredients that we're excited to play with.

Eliyahu Margulis: 30:06

Yeah, very cool we also did. This is a little known secret that I think maybe four people in the world know. We take Merlot from Shuva and we are aging it individually. We made 10 liters of it, very small, small, small, small batch, just to see what a single varietal of that Merlot is. Because when we tried, what came out? What's unique about the Syrah that we got from Givat Adah and the Merlot we got from Shuva are both naturally fermented and both naturally fermented in almost an unapologetically surprising way. We went in, we crushed the grapes and had the fullest intention. Had bought all the, all the yeast that we need To make this wine with, you know the yeast that we wanted, and by the time that we Went in to put in the yeast, it had already it was bubbling which is called your exact and and at that point as as as Winemakers, you have to also respond to.

Eliyahu Margulis: 31:08

You know what, what the natural Grape is giving you, and in this case, it was clearly shouting at us that we should Ferment it naturally. And it did, and it fermented beautifully. Not a single drop of yeast was added, not to the sira, not to the merlot. And the result of that, with the merlot, is this really unique creaminess that Just rides the full palette as you drink that merlot. We tried it actually today, gave it a lick to see how it's progressing, and it is just something wonderful.

Eliyahu Margulis: 31:41

Very cool, very cool, and so the plan for the future is to continue pushing that, continue pushing the envelope In both methodology and and varietals, and doing something unique Orange wine we wanted to age it. The muscatta lig zinjoni. There's other works that we want to do unique to white wines in the pipeline, using some unique Aging vessels as well one.

Tzvi Zucker: 32:11

One other pipe dream we'll get to in the white wine sphere is to do a retina, which is a bit of a historical interest of mine. Up until a few hundred years ago, maybe a hundred max, one of the ways that wine was preserved was with pine tar yeah, coating the inside of the, the clay vessels that it was sitting in, and I've wondered for a really long time what that must have tasted like. I grew up in Well, I grew up in Brooklyn.

S. Simon Jacob: 32:43

And. I know you're exposed to a lot of pine trees.

Tzvi Zucker: 32:45

Hmm, it's mostly maple and birch. Yeah, but I had to look it up when I got here because I had no idea what the types of trees were. Isn't proper New Yorker. They were just trees like five of them. But I never, I never saw, I didn't know what retina really was until I started. I mean, I read a British travel writer and and apparently retina is very popular in the United Kingdom, and I said what's retina? I never even heard of that before and once I worked out what it was and where it came from and what the history of it was, it's, it's something I want to do for a long time.

Eliyahu Margulis: 33:18

Well, the north here is also riddled with Aleppo pines and other kinds of pines, and it's just a simple task of tapping it. And then you have it naturally.

S. Simon Jacob: 33:28

In New Jersey. It was a Plague because the pine trees would drip on your car. Yeah, and then it would freeze, no, and it would crystallize it would crystallize in your car and it's Quite impossible to get off. Yeah, okay, it's not an easy task without taking off the paint. Yeah, so it, it's it. It's the first glue.

Eliyahu Margulis: 33:52

Yeah, it's fine, that's right so.

S. Simon Jacob: 33:56

Yeah, this is good to it, and not so good to it either. The other thing is you don't want to burn Non-dried pine that's right, because the the it's very flammable it's yeah, but it's also so awful smelling accurate. Yeah, it's accurate.

Eliyahu Margulis: 34:15

It's the reason why, when you like smoke meat, you don't use pine Right. You use a hardwood like an oak or an iron wood or or a cherry.

Tzvi Zucker: 34:22

That's also something that's also in our in our. Our list of eventual experiments to experiment with is different kinds of woods. Oak was picked because it does a really good job with adding vanilla to wines, but there are all sorts of other interesting compounds. Hardwoods, yeah, but that's no. But I mean, I'm sure there are people around the world that are doing it, but it's not something which is common.

S. Simon Jacob: 34:46

It's. They're doing it here. Yeah, you know, I'm telling you you should be Two things you should do. I mean I I don't want to be presumptuous and assume that you're not there were there's a wealth of Really great wine makers here that you should talk to. If you're gonna start playing with orange wines, I would definitely call the aqua warrior.

S. Simon Jacob: 35:08

He's very you know, very responsive. He's very busy with his winery down south in Pinto winery, and also with his own production with Aurea stuff. But he, he is, he's it. You know, he's one of the first people in Israel Seriously to take orange wines seriously and he is, and and he's gone through a lot and he has a lot of notes. Yeah, he keeps meticulous notes of what he's done and how he's done it and what's going on, and he's he's an incredible, incredibly creative Winemaker. He does not sit on his laurels. The last wine he made, the last wines he's been making, have been single vineyard, single varietal oh, wow. 12 Different, 12 or 13 different fermentations, okay, yeah, and then blending each of those full control for fermentations together.

Eliyahu Margulis: 36:15

You know who does that also. You tear winery does that as well not anyone here, this level Not.

S. Simon Jacob: 36:21

I know the I need. I know you tear as well, yeah, but um, but Yako is like, yeah, wild Ned scientist, but it's, I'll be honest, his whites that he's produced that way have been Unbelievable. They're like fine. They're like fine white burgundies Coming out of Israel and it's like crazy to see, crazy to see yeah, wine making.

Eliyahu Margulis: 36:51

You can compare it to so many different things. I think of it almost in a, in a symphony, in a symphony kind of way yeah or in a cooking kind of way as a chef, right? You're putting in these tiny little things that if it wasn't there, you know that it's missing. If there's too much of it, it's ruins the whole plate, right? Or ruins the whole symphony piece of like.

Tzvi Zucker: 37:09

When they go and a pinch of salt, you're like as if a pinch is gonna, but it does. It makes a difference.

Eliyahu Margulis: 37:14

You reach across roads in Wine, making every point, and the winemaker then has all these various decisions that create future decisions, right, and Future choices that need to be made, and those choices are infinite. Like you said, you can ferment two different wines. We've had this conversation Just on a logistics standpoint.

Tzvi Zucker: 37:37

We always call it solving a puzzle with moving pieces.

Eliyahu Margulis: 37:39

Yeah, that's exactly, and one of my favorite things to do is solve puzzles that are really so, and I do that on a daily basis in my job.

Tzvi Zucker: 37:45

But Now you have to say what it is my job. Yeah.

Eliyahu Margulis: 37:50

I design mass transit stations, public train stations, mattress and things like that as an architect. But with wine, if you're fermenting beforehand, right, we were talking about this just from a logistical standpoint, because you need the vessels, right, you need the the Nero stuff.

Eliyahu Margulis: 38:13

The Nero stuff, the barrels or whatever to produce the wine should be ferment together and then you have a blend from the get-go and then you're kind of solving a problem of having multiple vessels to ferment in or multiple tanks to ferment in, or do you ferment them separately and then you have full control into how they blend afterwards. And that's unique, but that again is a decision that the winemaker gets to at the very beginning.

S. Simon Jacob: 38:39

That's one of the reasons, by the way, that many of the wineries use barrels, because when you have these big fermenters, you're very limited as to what you can feed back into it and you need enough volume to fill your ass.

S. Simon Jacob: 38:59

And a lot of them now have stacked fermenters, so they've got multiple fermenters and one big steel vat. But it's hard because there's this constant war of hey, I don't want to leave it open to oxygen, I want to leave it in the place, and that defines more where it's going to end up than anything else, because sometimes you just don't have something to put it into. That's the right size. So you came up to that early.

Tzvi Zucker: 39:34

Yeah, we cut our teeth well and quick.

S. Simon Jacob: 39:39

Most winemakers have that issue and that's why they use barrels.

Eliyahu Margulis: 39:46

What we did a lot of in 2023 is also experiment with another aspect. We spoke about methodology, we spoke about varietals, but one thing that I think gets hidden in winemaking and it's something hidden and stays with the winemaker is yeast. So yeast can control significantly how a wine ferments not only how it ferments, but the flavor profile that is extracted out of the grapes, and yeast has a lot of influence on the flavor of the wine.

S. Simon Jacob: 40:19

Very much so, yes, but I'll tell you one of the other things you haven't run into yet and I'm not acting like a smart guy because I have not. I've made very little wine in my life, but I've experienced winemaking enough to know this. Your facility is kind of outside right now, half and half. Yes, okay, you're into natural yeast from the grapes and what have you? Once you have a facility, there's no way you can ever have natural yeast from grapes anymore, because the yeast goes into that winery and it's everywhere. So once you use commercial yeast, you can think that you're not.

Tzvi Zucker: 41:01

But you still are. You're still using commercial yeast.

S. Simon Jacob: 41:04

So what winemakers try to do is use the yeast that they want and overpower whatever is left in the winery that they've had before. And it's not because they don't like trying to do it, naturally, it's just an impossibility once you get to a certain size.

Eliyahu Margulis: 41:18

So what we were doing and because maybe we're blessed with still being very, very small is we did both natural and desired yeast fermentations. The rose that we spoke about is a unique. We took a red wine yeast for that. We also made a wine that we're entirely keeping to ourselves, which is it's the mirror image of the rose.

Tzvi Zucker: 41:43

The rose is made from red grapes. The grapes were taken out of the, you know were fermented in the must, but we had the grapes, so I put them in a different barrel and I threw actually white wine yeast into it an exact mirror image and said, well, we'll see what happens, right.

Eliyahu Margulis: 41:59

And it turned out a red wine.

Tzvi Zucker: 42:01

And what happens is it looks. It's pale. It's not quite a red wine. You can see that some of it's missing, blush, but well it's red. It's not the same kind of rich, you know red color as the Cabernet Francure or as the San Giovese may sometimes be. And what is fascinating is if you drink it with your eyes closed you'll swear it's white. The yeast made that much of a, and again, that was something which held true, whether somebody was a novice, a connoisseur, just, even though, like, your eyes are kind of just lying to you at that point.

S. Simon Jacob: 42:44

It's funny. I was one of the wineries and I tasted this wine and I said, wow, this has got some real body to it. How did you get it with this varietal? And they said, huh, you taste that, don't you? And I said, yeah, but I have no clue how you got it with this varietal. And they said actually, we threw it on the leaves of some grouache that we had sitting. And I said, oh, that's crazy.

Tzvi Zucker: 43:13

I'm convinced that in the Bayet Rishon this was one of the let's call it technological advances that powered the economy here. There are a lot of Michelin that Naveem give, where they call the aristocrats the Shmarim, on which everything else sits, and the way that they describe it. You get the concept that they saved them year over year, that it wasn't something where, like, there was East making was just as much of the technology as wine making was, which was fascinating just to see as learning to nach, and it was a little bit of what motivated us to start like messing around with it as a thing, but it wasn't something I had given really any thought of until I started making wine. You never see, I mean I've never seen on a label where somebody will say this was made with this yeast or any other strain of.

Eliyahu Margulis: 44:09

Let me tell you the wine maker's know exactly what you're, I'm sure, exactly, but that's what we're saying, but the kind of server it doesn't know.

S. Simon Jacob: 44:17

No, well, in some instances we made some wine with Vidkin, a friend of mine, avi Davidovitz and myself and Asaf Paz, and they used very specific yeasts because we tasted it and this is what. And Asaf said this is what we need to use. And yeah, it's also funny because a number of the winemakers that I've met and interviewed and spoken come from bread and pastry and I said wait a second, did you get into yeast?

S. Simon Jacob: 44:50

and then you decided you're going to go into wine and they all go no maybe they all kind of love yeast and I guess you'd go into beer making as well that way, but that's more of a direct route. But wine is a real challenge. It's a lot of fun and it's really interesting. But yeah, it's not lost on most winemakers how important yeast is.

Eliyahu Margulis: 45:16

Well, that's like I was saying it's a hidden aspect to winemaking that I would say the general public don't get to experience. And so, as we're discovering into our own winemaking journey the different varieties of yeast, but also the influence of yeast on both the flavor and the fermentation process, and then the end result, so you mentioned yatir.

S. Simon Jacob: 45:42

One of the things that came to mind when you were speaking before was that yatir has a bunch of vats now that are out of different woods, that are not oak and concrete. Well, concrete, concrete's another whole story. So that's another whole story. You can talk to a bunch of people about that. I would strongly recommend that. If you ever wanted to go into the concrete winemaking business, speak to Amikhae Luria. But that said, they use different woods because they have different qualities, that they didn't want oak, but they wanted a softer influence, and each of the woods imparts a different micro-oxidization into the wine as well as a different flavor. So it's different and there are a lot of options.

Eliyahu Margulis: 46:49

A lot of options. Yeah, I mean I think that's part of the winemaking process is all those options?

Tzvi Zucker: 46:54

And then as part of what into how we named ourselves, or at least what we were trying to do, is because there are all these different little pieces that if you zoom out, really paint a different picture.

S. Simon Jacob: 47:05

Well, it occurred to me, A bottle of wine.

Tzvi Zucker: 47:07

Well, it occurred to me that there's an art form that does exactly that, but it's stuck for the pun that mosaic also means as referring to Moses. It's a big part of tradition, innovation and where we come from and what we're trying to do, and all those little moving pieces and all those little things that wind up making massive differences down the line in terms of what happens and what people taste. And you can take the same grapes and wind up with two. Maybe a classically trained connoisseur will be able to say they came from the same vineyard. But that's what makes it fun, I feel like that's why connoisseurs love it. They're minute differences to understand and then appreciate.

S. Simon Jacob: 47:57

I asked you earlier and, well, I introduced you earlier mistakenly as mosaic winery, but it isn't. It's actually mosaic cellar, yeah, cellars, yeah. So that's you know. It's hard to find, you guys, because if you put in the word mosaic, amichailuria has got you beat Of course, of course, hands down, of course everything, of course, his highest I know I've trained you guys looking for it, though. You do have a LinkedIn page and I'll include, you know, the links to get to you guys.

Eliyahu Margulis: 48:30

We're expanding our footprint, we're really green in terms of the social media presence and that's something we're building up. Our focus has been the wine for now, and we're getting the winery to a point where it's at a certain volume and certain capacity, funding itself Right, the amount you can make it back will fund at the next season, and so on and so forth, and so we're almost at that point in terms of the winery where it can, you know, fund itself and, as we keep growing, it can also fund a certain amount of growth, stable, and that will then also allow us to also expand our own presence.

Eliyahu Margulis: 49:13

Our online footprint is our physical Our online footprint, as well as the distribution of the wine within stores, restaurants and beyond and beyond.

S. Simon Jacob: 49:23

Yeah, so right now you're distributing directly word of mouth. For the most part, that's right, absolutely Okay.

S. Simon Jacob: 49:32

So we need to find some ways to get people to connect so that, even though you have a small amount of wine, it shouldn't be any effort to get rid of all of it very, very rapidly. So we'll see. We'll try to make some connections Greatly appreciated. Yeah, I was going to ask you as well as where you, where you both originally from, because part of the honestly part of my listenership are people who are in Hul and outside of Israel who dream about making Aliyah. Okay, that's number one. Number two is the people who listen to my podcast are all dreaming about wine. So if they can get to Israel and also do something with wine, then that's.

Eliyahu Margulis: 50:18

That's the dream, isn't it?

S. Simon Jacob: 50:20

So how did you guys actually get there? How did you you know, where did you come from and how did you get to this?

Tzvi Zucker: 50:27

I grew up in what I like to call monochrome flatbush. Okay, everything was black and white. Um, I moved here when I was 25 years old. At the time I was married. I had two young children. I had wanted to. I had been planning this for years. I like to say that when I first moved and then I went back to visit, everybody came over to me and asked me if I was sane. Five years later they said wow, it's amazing. You're like already there and set up, but you know because, like you know, I think at some point we might all have to. And then you know, another few years after that they're like yeah, you had a lot of foresight to go when you did All in the span of you know, not much time at all. I first came to the kosher wine scene staffing Kedem's big yearly bash that they hold in New York.

S. Simon Jacob: 51:19

KFWA. Yeah, so who did you know from there?

Tzvi Zucker: 51:24

Well, where I was in Yeshiva at the time, there was somebody with connections to Looking for. Royal Wine Corp. And they were like oh, shumbershop is people with you know.

Tzvi Zucker: 51:33

They're looking for wine pours, basically, yes, and I found myself at a table with the regional salesmen for the area that I lived in and when I realized what the real game was for what was going on, I was like if you can move around the floor, you could do pretty well here, right? And he said, yeah, it's like all right, I got the table, don't worry about it, have fun. He was really, really appreciative and so he came back to me a couple months later and he said they're trying something new where they want to put people into the stores to try to do tastings to educate the public. The kosher wine supply was growing a lot faster than the kosher wine demand was for a little while and this was their way of stoking the demand side. I guess this is like the Thursday night Shumbershop.

S. Simon Jacob: 52:16

Yeah, exactly, but like in the stores, thursdays and Fridays, in the back of the store, in the front of the store.

Tzvi Zucker: 52:22

And so I actually had a really, in hindsight, envious experience where I got to learn a few thousand people's palates, understood what they like, what they don't, and they'd walk in and go, what am I drinking this week? And I just point. I'm like what are you eating? Like what's on the menu? And I point and they nail it you know eight, nine times out of 10. And it was great. It was great. It was a lot of fun. To like, realize the consumer side of wine without realizing at the time is what I was doing when I moved here. I didn't really have much to do with the wine industry at all, but from the same time, like back then, I have there's a Google Calendar invite with my old Chavruza from Yashiva on his 65th birthday where it says retire, open winery with Tzvi. So it was always like for me anyway, it was always the end goal to get into this and this is literally a dream come true.

S. Simon Jacob: 53:21

Wow, so you're also working. Yes, what do you do as well?

Tzvi Zucker: 53:27

I'm working at a tech company digital marketing Very cool, Thank you, so you got to get into digital marketing for you guys.

Eliyahu Margulis: 53:33

I know you've been doing it. He's the expert. I can design the facility. He can't bust your chops. I have to bust your chops.

S. Simon Jacob: 53:41

That's it, it's okay.

Tzvi Zucker: 53:43

Chops are for bustin.

Eliyahu Margulis: 53:45

I grew up in suburban Connecticut. My parents are Soviet refugees. Where we're in suburban Connecticut, west Hartford, connecticut, west Hartford sure.

S. Simon Jacob: 53:53

I had a sister and brother. We're there Living in the Shoal, the Orthodox Shoal. There the last name is Malik, steve Malik, and Sally. Malik Sally's my sister, so it's a small world, really small world.

Tzvi Zucker: 54:08

I used to know the rabbi from there.

S. Simon Jacob: 54:11

The rabbi cone was there I know a while, so I grew up there, born in also in Brooklyn.

Eliyahu Margulis: 54:19

My parents are refugees from the former Soviet Union, came in the late 80s, where, whereabouts? Moscow, moscow. My mother's side of family is very Lubavitch, from Belogos, metichos yeah, very, very, very strong ichos to the first Lubavitcher Revy. And my parents came to America. They knew they were Jewish because it was written in their passports Jew. But my mom knew a little bit more. Her family was, her mother was religious up until adulthood, but she, my mom, did not grow up religious. My dad, the first time he ever saw a Shoal synagogue was on their first date, on Rosh Hashanah, and he went to the when they went to the main synagogue, the great synagogue in Moscow. So in America they slowly started finding religion. They first came to Israel. I grew up in suburban Connecticut with, I would say, a privileged life, growing up swimming, hiking, forests, nature, tennis lessons, art lessons. I'm a classically trained artist and that's how I got to architecture, which is what I do now. And then I went to the university of Maryland.

S. Simon Jacob: 55:34

Down in College Park. Oh right, I saw that. Yeah, my sister was also a university of Maryland. Yeah, sally, it's an amazing amazing school, yeah.

Eliyahu Margulis: 55:41

And then I made aliyah in 2015 by myself. My family followed suit fairly soon after I got married. I have four wonderful daughters, triplets, three girls that are five and another young three, and for me, wine kind of started. I came to Yeshiva here for a year gap year and I was up in the Hesder Yeshiva where.

Eliyahu Margulis: 56:08

Hespin, hespin, and so I volunteered at the Golan winery in Kutsuin and they needed to show me about people to help sort the wine, crush it, do some work within the wine that adds, actually handle the grapes and the tea wash and the juice, and so I fell in love with the process. Then my dad's a he's a chemist, he has a PhD in chemistry, so always the chemistry and the biology aspect of of wine making was always interesting to me and kind of both my father and I dove into the wine making and and wine drinking. We'll call it culture here in Israel, as it both expanded almost similarly to the way craft breweries expanded in the United States over the last 30 years, and with this huge explosion of really high, high quality wine we grew to be in our own right to become connoisseurs, and so making wine now has just been an extension of that of of producing something that we ourselves would want to go to the shelf and buy, and so I mean that's like we said, it's just living the dream a little bit.

S. Simon Jacob: 57:25

A lot. It is so that's amazing Really awesome.

Eliyahu Margulis: 57:29

So we both live in Dilev now. We're both, our families are there, our houses are there, and you actually met there, we met in. Dilev yeah, when Sui came to look at the issue was the day we met.

Tzvi Zucker: 57:42

It's a very, very, very close knit, tight knit place. People who are coming to think of living there generally introduced a whole bunch of families along the way. First, the hopes of the decision yeah, but it's also nice.

Eliyahu Margulis: 57:56

And less than 300 families.

Tzvi Zucker: 57:57

The Mark and Lisa's were one of the families that were introduced us at the beginning.

S. Simon Jacob: 58:03

Helped us feel at home. Are they mostly egg blows or the everything?

Tzvi Zucker: 58:07

It's about, I would say, about 15% English speaking, of which about half to two thirds are Olim and the rest are, let's say, second or third generation.

Eliyahu Margulis: 58:18

There's also like secret anglos. You know people that you would. They speak Hebrew to you. You speak Hebrew to them, and then somebody says oh yeah, they're from Queens and you're just like they're from Queens. And then you all of a sudden start talking to them in English and you're like, well, where?

Tzvi Zucker: 58:31

were you as I was breaking my teeth. I've known you for six months. Thanks for letting me know Exactly.

Eliyahu Margulis: 58:37

But 15, 20% is about English speakers. That you know. And it's beautiful. It's a beautiful community. It's up in the mountains, west Benjamin is a very, very nice, magical place.

Eliyahu Margulis: 58:49

And there are vineyards there Very unique to West Benjamin. There's not a lot of vineyards in that area, but in the love there's Klamim, and so it's a really, really beautiful area, and so we happen to be lucky to also make the wine in our backyard, quite literally, and right now we're looking to expand facilities wise as well. We need bigger spaces storage space, obviously, and production space, and that's all part of, you know, building a winery and growing, and you know the growing pains of trying to produce and build something.

Tzvi Zucker: 59:26

Everybody talks about sustainability, but there's more than one meaning to that.

S. Simon Jacob: 59:30

Yeah, sustainability is like how do I have money for next year?

Eliyahu Margulis: 59:34

Yeah, next month, yeah, I know.

S. Simon Jacob: 59:37

It is kind of funny.

Eliyahu Margulis: 59:39

But yeah, listen, olim, I talk to Olim a lot of the time, especially architects. I want to come to Israel, but, olim, they come to Israel and if they have a dream and they have the ability to chase that dream, both financially and with a know-how and mentality, I think Tobi and I are a good example of if you work it out, if you try, if you study. I mean, I don't think at any point we were ever surprised in the winemaking process by a result in the sense that something would happen. We were like, oh, we know exactly why that happened Because we did our research, we did our you know our own education.

Tzvi Zucker: 1:00:19

If you will. It is no dream, but for real.

S. Simon Jacob: 1:00:23

Thanks, hidl. No, well, but it's true.

Tzvi Zucker: 1:00:25

Yes it is. It's true. I don't know if this says more about my like, I guess how I think of myself, but if I can do this, I'm pretty sure nearly anyone can.

Eliyahu Margulis: 1:00:34

You think so little of yourself.

Tzvi Zucker: 1:00:37

It takes, look, it takes a certain amount of dedication. It takes a certain amount of pluck. You got to be able to accept whatever comes out of it, especially if you're going to start with small quantities.

Eliyahu Margulis: 1:00:49

Yeah, chutzpah, you were talking about? Yeah, exactly that, If you have the chutzpah to try then Ellie from Castel yeah, you have to have the chutzpah you have to have the chutzpah to try.

Eliyahu Margulis: 1:00:58

You have to have the chutzpah to go out there to talk to these winemakers, to talk to the growers right, to talk to the people that are out in the vineyards that know their grapes, they know how much water is going to be there at the end of August and beginning of September If they have the slope, what kind of impacts the slope, the soil, the terroir have on those grapes, and talking to them and learning from them as well. We learn so much by just going out to these places, see, and I will just drive up to a vineyard, talk to a person the grower, the farmer, or talk to the winemaker, and a lot of that. How many trips have we made to different?

Tzvi Zucker: 1:01:39

winemakers, please, more than we can count. More than we can count.

Eliyahu Margulis: 1:01:42

Just learning and just trying to absorb as much from everything and I think if you ever stop learning, then I think you're already on the path to starting to fail.

S. Simon Jacob: 1:01:55

That's about 30% at. What I've found is that the winemakers who have become successful are always they have very open minds. Even Ali Benzakain, I mean. He, has an incredibly open mind as far as learning new things and experiencing things and asking questions. He doesn't have any problems asking.

Eliyahu Margulis: 1:02:21

And there has to be flexibility in the winemaking process. You have to be flexible and you have to react and also be able to accept what the wine gives you Right. And if you are dead set on making one thing and one thing only and it doesn't go that way, you have to have you also have to be humble a little bit.

S. Simon Jacob: 1:02:41

I mean, one of the things with Yakovoria which is really cute is he has a wine called Yafaka Livana and it's pretty as the moon is the translation, but it's really pretty as a white and it's pink and it wasn't supposed to be pink. It was supposed to be a white and he had no problem saying hey, look this is what happened I was talking to.

Eliyahu Margulis: 1:03:09

I forget his last name, yaakov from LaFroy Blanche.

S. Simon Jacob: 1:03:12

Okay, I don't know him. I don't know him. I know exactly what you mean. Wonderful wonderful winery he's supposed to be a winery.

Eliyahu Margulis: 1:03:19

First of all, I could not recommend them any more than I can. They make really exceptional high quality wines and they were just telling me this was I think it was last year, maybe two years ago. They their white wine, one of their white wines the grapes didn't come. They just didn't produce properly. So they had to. You know, they had their blend that they needed to put out, to get it to put it out there, and they had to improvise it the last second and it came out better than the blend that they've been putting out for the last couple years. And you know that kind of you know humbling experience of you need to be that flexible, you need to be able to react to it and you still can make a beautiful product, but you need to be able to, you know, be able to absorb that and be flexible to what the wine's showing you.

S. Simon Jacob: 1:04:05

You know one of the things, one of the people who's a young wine maker, sam Baum. Do you know him? No, okay. So Sam Baum actually manages a vineyard for a very, very large wine maker and they put him in, they have enough faith in him. He's responsible for one of their main vineyards and he's making red wines Baum family winery. You should look it up because he's also very small, trying to make incredibly quality wines, but the approach from him is from the vineyard and he really has been focused on vineyards and focused on how to manage a vineyard and how to groom a vineyard and what to do.

S. Simon Jacob: 1:04:58

And it's really cool because there's so many ways to come into wine that it's really fun to see it all.

Eliyahu Margulis: 1:05:08

I think that's also part of it is the marriage between the wine maker and the vineyard and the farmer.

Eliyahu Margulis: 1:05:15

So the winery and the vineyard are so interlaced and so finding that pairing right. If you're not growing your own grapes, like we are, we're buying our grapes. You know, another dream of ours One day is to be able to plant our own vineyards, but until that time comes, like many other producers in Israel, we buy our grapes and what we found is finding the right partner in the vineyard that looks and wants to have that same kind of pairing of quality, that same ideology in terms of what they're doing. So a lot of the vineyards that we're talking to are also looking at natural ways of extracting greater depths of flavor. One of the vineyards we're talking to is culling their clusters this upcoming year to really reduce the quantity so that you can really concentrate the flavor in the clusters that we're gonna have.

S. Simon Jacob: 1:06:12

I've seen that work in that work. So I'm just telling you it's like it's interesting.

Tzvi Zucker: 1:06:16

It's fascinating to see it from a vineyard that's not making the wines. Because he's taking a risk yeah, 100%, he's slashing what he can sell.

S. Simon Jacob: 1:06:23

A lot of them say that to winemakers and then they just sell them.

Tzvi Zucker: 1:06:29

You didn't see this. Yeah, yeah, no but it's.

S. Simon Jacob: 1:06:32

there's some dishonest people, but typically most of them are very, very honest. One of the other people I would speak to is Tomer Panini at Tom Winery near Itamar. That's an incredible vineyard and an incredible winery. I helped plant some of that and helped pick some of it and then made a wine up there, yeah, called Robinutome.

Eliyahu Margulis: 1:06:55

Nice.

S. Simon Jacob: 1:06:56

I picked crazy names.

Eliyahu Margulis: 1:06:58

Oh, that was great, so that's the other one Best enjoyed after nightfall.

S. Simon Jacob: 1:07:04

Yes, yes.

Eliyahu Margulis: 1:07:06

Another winemaker that we've been seriously talking to also I can't recommend them enough is the Winery Scoria up north, if you've ever tried them.

S. Simon Jacob: 1:07:15

I have tried them and I've seen it and I was surprised at how good the wine was from there. But I've never spoken to the winemaker.

Eliyahu Margulis: 1:07:22

So All Fair is the winemaker and I can put you in contact with him. One of the most absolutely humble, down-to-earth people.

Tzvi Zucker: 1:07:30

Salt of the, the types of people that make you proud, just to be in this.

S. Simon Jacob: 1:07:37

That's the same thing with Tomer. It's like looking at a halutz from 19.

Eliyahu Margulis: 1:07:41

Yes, that's exactly it looks exactly like an image from a poster.

S. Simon Jacob: 1:07:45

That's right, so it's like crazy.

Eliyahu Margulis: 1:07:47

So Scoria. They produce really really high quality wine, really high quality wine, I would say. Very French, heavily French influence, and been talking a lot to Ophiel from Scoria in terms of production and trying to learn from him as well. There's a wealth of knowledge in this country and everybody's willing to share.

S. Simon Jacob: 1:08:12

Yeah, yeah, which is one of the coolest things that's out there. You'd be surprised. Some of the biggest winemakers are open to talk and what have you. So it's fun. It's really fun to see that. I keep saying fun it's a lot of hard work.

Tzvi Zucker: 1:08:29

I know it's a lot of hard work, but when hard work is fun that's, that's living life, yeah.

S. Simon Jacob: 1:08:35

Yeah, so anything else you'd like to talk about or mention?

Eliyahu Margulis: 1:08:43

No, I mean, this was a wonderful. Thank you so much for having us.

S. Simon Jacob: 1:08:46

It was an amazing conversation, it's a real pleasure to have you on the show.

Tzvi Zucker: 1:08:49

Now I'll need to get all the numbers for all the names that we mentioned so we can go follow. I have no problem doing that. I have no problem.

S. Simon Jacob: 1:08:56

Absolutely no problem.

Eliyahu Margulis: 1:08:57

And we'll leave this wine with you, of course. Thank you, obviously, I want to taste it.

S. Simon Jacob: 1:09:01

I really want to give it a little bit of time.

Eliyahu Margulis: 1:09:03

The red wine will, and put the rosé in the fridge a little bit. I'm going to. I'm going to.

S. Simon Jacob: 1:09:08

They're going to Thank you. That's really awesome.

Tzvi Zucker: 1:09:11

Thank you Wow.

S. Simon Jacob: 1:09:14

All right. This is Simon Jacob, again your host of today's episode of the Kosher Teraweh. I have a personal request no matter where you are or where you live, please take a moment to pray for our soldier's safety, rapid return of our hostages and, whenever possible, buy and share Israeli wine. I hope you have enjoyed this episode of the Kosher Terwah. It was exciting and informative for me as well. Please subscribe via your podcast provider to be informed of our new episodes as they are released. If you're new to the Kosher Terwah, please check out our many past episodes. The Kosher Terwah is also available on the Nahum Siegel Network at 6.30pm New York Time Thursday evening and on the world famous NSN app.