English transcription for this episode of The Kosher Terroir, featuring the exclusive visit to Amphorae Winery.

Podcast Transcription: The Kosher Terroir

Episode: Amphorae Winery & The Samuel Series

00:00 - 00:21

Simon Jacob: Welcome to The Kosher Terroir. I’m your host, Simon Jacob, 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. 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.

00:21 - 00:46

Amphorae Guide: We are in the middle of a transition between winemakers. We had Meiram Harel, who made everything you taste here; he’s been with us since 2016 until a month ago. And now, Igor Ivanov has stepped in. He’s coming from Garage de Papa of Ido Lewinsohn, if you know it.

Simon Jacob: Right, right.

Amphorae Guide: So he’s just getting the hang of things. He hasn’t made wine here yet; he has the next harvest ahead of him in August.

00:46 - 01:12

Amphorae Guide: Once that comes out, we’ll have some Samuel wines that he actually made and was a part of. And that’s a good idea for him to come to the podcast and just talk about it.

Simon Jacob: I look forward to it.

Amphorae Guide: Yeah, exactly. We are in the middle of a bottling process, so that’s why he’s not available today.

01:12 - 01:35

Amphorae Guide: We do outside bottling because it takes a lot of time. What we did up until three years ago—we were bottling, labeling, and packaging everything in-house. It would take us, I’d say, for a single wine which is around 10,000 to 20,000 bottles, it would take us a month or a month and a half until we labeled it and put it on pallets.

01:35 - 01:54

Amphorae Guide: He does it—his name is Yoel. He gives service to most wineries in Israel.

Simon Jacob: Yeah, it's a truck. He comes with the truck.

Amphorae Guide: It comes with like a big shipping container which contains all the machines and everything. And he finished 100,000 bottles in, I’d say, 10 working days.

01:54 - 02:16

Simon Jacob: So, how many bottles do you actually produce here?

Amphorae Guide: It depends on the year, but if we do an average of a five-year plan, it’s around 120,000 to 150,000.

Simon Jacob: And how much of that is kosher?

Amphorae Guide: The kosher part—this is the first series that came out. The Asis and the Ofek, which are the first reds we did, were released in September.

02:16 - 02:37

Amphorae Guide: And the white and the rosé that you tasted were released in January or mid-February. We’ve been doing this process for the past four to five years, from 2020 or 2021. So it takes time. We basically made some of our vineyards kosher and we purchased new ones especially for that.

02:37 - 02:58

Simon Jacob: Wow. So you’re really starting the kosher wines from scratch, from the grapes and the specific vineyard all the way through?

Amphorae Guide: We did. And right now, we are doing it in a service winery. For us, our winery is all Jewish, but we are not able to make kosher wines in this facility.

02:58 - 03:22

Amphorae Guide: It would make the winemaker a lot less involved, exactly. So that’s the main reason for us all over these years to not make kosher wines here. But we do see the potential and the request of people who really want to. And we see it right now; once we published this, we have a lot of inquiries.

03:22 - 03:51

Amphorae Guide: I think we just sent wine to Mamilla in Jerusalem—it’s a hotel or a cafe, it’s a new business that we started with.

Simon Jacob: They're a great hotel and they’ve got a great wine list.

Amphorae Guide: Good pick! Amphorae is in a bunch of places that are high profile—A-list restaurants in Tel Aviv. In Jerusalem, we weren't actually that popular because we didn't have kosher, but right now we are proceeding with it.

03:51 - 04:15

Simon Jacob: Do you export your wines at all?

Amphorae Guide: We do not. Because once we started with the kosher wines, it wasn’t really the place and the time to start exporting. When I spoke about the Amphorae identity, Israel in itself had a lot of identity change in the past 20 years between winemaking and wine drinking.

04:15 - 04:36

Amphorae Guide: In the 2010s, you would only see a bottle of Merlot, a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon, and maybe a Sauvignon Blanc. But you would never see any Rosé or anything resembling Mourvèdre, Cinsault, or Grenache Noir—everything from the Southern region of France. And that changed a lot, not only in Amphorae but in Israel in wine drinking itself.

04:36 - 05:01

Amphorae Guide: When I compare winemakers, before Meiram in 2016, we had Arkadi Papikian. Arkadi was spot-on old-school Israeli wines. It was a lot of oak and a lot of French classic wines like Cabernet Sauvignon or the Bordeaux blends which were very familiar in Israel.

05:01 - 05:25

Amphorae Guide: Once Meiram joined, people started noticing that they want wines that are more suitable to drink even in the summer—which here, in 40-degree heat, is a bit hard. In Israel, we started seeing more and more esoteric grapes, just like we have here: Cinsault and Counoise.

Simon Jacob: I like that. "Shiloov Nadir" (Rare blend).

05:25 - 05:54

Amphorae Guide: The logo itself is basically a fingerprint, and the same layout when you look from an aerial view of the Katsuto vineyard that we get most of our grapes from.

Simon Jacob: I've never heard of this before—Counoise?

Amphorae Guide: Cinsault and Counoise, yeah. Both are Loire and Rhône Valley of France.

Simon Jacob: Is anyone else in Israel using these grapes?

Amphorae Guide: I think so, but mostly in blends.

05:54 - 06:17

Amphorae Guide: We have produced a bunch of Cinsault and Counoise. Cinsault is pretty common. Counoise is a more esoteric strain of grape. If you’d see them in Israel, I assume you’d find them in blends. Not a lot of people do them on their own.

06:17 - 06:42

Amphorae Guide: There’s a whole genre in Israel where wineries make a sub-label of kosher wine, and it doesn't always have the same identity as the main winery. I was worried about the same thing before we actually released and I tasted the wine. But when I tasted it—if I did a blind tasting—I wouldn't even know the difference because there’s a lot of identity of our winemaking in it.

06:42 - 07:05

Simon Jacob: So you make this sort of blend for Amphorae that's not kosher?

Amphorae Guide: We have a similar series, yes. It’s not the same, because we do want to make stuff that is varied from each other to make our repertoire full. But we have a whole series in Amphorae that’s called Terroir.

Simon Jacob: I speak French. And my podcast is called The Kosher Terroir.

07:05 - 07:31

Amphorae Guide: Okay, so we have—this is such a different... I’ve never tasted anything like this before. For me personally, this is the best part of our winemaking in Amphorae. We do have the Bordeaux blend, the classic wines, the Cabernet Sauvignon, the Merlot, and the Cabernet Franc.

Simon Jacob: This is the lighter one. It's so soft, it's so silky and cottony. It's so relaxed.

07:31 - 07:56

Simon Jacob: There’s nothing at all sharp in there. It’s so pleasant, so relaxing.

Amphorae Guide: I just like to call it—it’s more of a Beaujolais wine, but it’s not because it’s not the first wine of the harvest. But it resembles it a lot. The whole Terroir series—it's a summer wine, an Israeli wine.

07:56 - 08:24

Amphorae Guide: I like to drink it once I take it from the wine fridge, so it’s a bit colder. And we have a lot of that sort of wine in Amphorae. The Terroir series comes from a vineyard that produces a lot of grapes for the Samuel series, that's called Katsuto. Katsuto is in Peki'in, in the Western part of the Galilee.

08:24 - 08:49

Amphorae Guide: We managed the vineyard ourselves. And that’s what I like about the new-age revolution of wine in Israel—because people are starting to figure out that we don’t only need the classic heavy wines. We should keep doing them and they're brilliant, but we have those other wines in our toolset.

08:49 - 09:14

Simon Jacob: Would you say—let’s say I keep kosher, so I’m not going to taste your other wines at Amphorae. What am I missing out on?

Amphorae Guide: The Grenache Noir. Because we love the GSM in Israel—Grenache, Syrah, Mourvèdre. People love it here, but they never actually took time to taste the Mourvèdre or the Grenache as a single strain wine.

09:14 - 09:37

Amphorae Guide: And that's a shame, because the Grenache Noir actually grows very similar to Spanish or Southern French Grenache, which is brilliant. What I really like is seeing grapes that aren't "textbook" and they're not supposed to grow here, but they actually do have a lot of resemblance when they grow in Israel, like Grenache Blanc.

09:37 - 10:04

Amphorae Guide: Yekev Vitkin does a brilliant Grenache Blanc.

Simon Jacob: I was just going to say to you, all the things you’re saying—if you want to taste them, go to Vitkin.

Amphorae Guide: Exactly. Assaf does exactly the same thing. This tastes to me like an Assaf Paz wine. There’s a focus on excellence, of trying to make a wine that’s just really good. It's not just making wine; it's trying to make really good wine.

10:04 - 10:30

Amphorae Guide: Assaf was one of the first ones starting to break habits in 2010 with Rosé. And I think Meiram, our winemaker who made all of this, took a lot of inspiration, I assume. But Vitkin does a brilliant Grenache Blanc. No one else does Grenache Blanc, which is a shame because it grows very, very good in Israel.

10:30 - 10:51

Simon Jacob: Now, let's talk about the wine.

Amphorae Guide: This wine is great. That’s the new age wine. I’m proud of you, I’m happy for you, this is... wow. And this is basically our standard of winemaking. We do both, and I like to divide it into series.

10:51 - 11:15

Amphorae Guide: We have the Med, the table wine, which is again, a lot of Mourvèdre and Syrah and the lighter wines. Instead of Sauvignon Blanc, it would be the Med White which is French Colombard. And the white wine that we tasted is Clairette and Viognier.

Simon Jacob: Clairette is a grape, right? Yeah.

Amphorae Guide: Those would take the biggest percentage in our portfolio.

11:15 - 11:42

Amphorae Guide: But when we talk about our tradition, which we can go back to the first wine we made in Amphorae, it had the same name—the Rhyton, which is a series that's based on an homage to Bordeaux. We’ve got two blends: the red version and the white version. We will continue making them out of tradition and we’ll give them our angle too.

11:42 - 12:07

Simon Jacob: So what led me to Amphorae, actually, is Michel Rolland.

Amphorae Guide: Yeah. Do you want another splash?

Simon Jacob: No, I’m good.

Amphorae Guide: Michel Rolland just passed away two weeks ago or three weeks ago.

Simon Jacob: I know, I just did a podcast about him.

Amphorae Guide: So we did the Velours with him. That's the highest profile wine that we did, and he was a lot of—yeah, from 2008 to 2013, he had a lot of influence on our wines.

12:07 - 12:35

Simon Jacob: You still follow his procedures?

Amphorae Guide: I wouldn’t say that. I would say we take a lot of inspiration. Because we did a Velours 2022 without Michel Rolland, but it has to follow the Velours that Michel Rolland did. So we waited nine years until we could actually make something that resembles it in its peak or its excellence to achieve the same name. We don't want to ruin the name of the brand.

12:35 - 13:03

Amphorae Guide: Same goes with the Makura. The Makura that Michel Rolland—that's our flagship series, basically. The Makura is after the name of the ranch that we are here right now. So he helped a lot with the Makura. We held them until we could produce a good enough wine to stand by itself.

13:03 - 13:28

Amphorae Guide: So right now, when we do Makuras, we do it every three years, every two years, only when we can produce a good enough wine. Because there’s a lot of tradition. Even though we changed winemakers and even though we had a new owner, there’s still the customer who knows the Rhyton and knows the Makura and will want to taste the resemblance.

13:28 - 13:54

Amphorae Guide: And in winemaking you cannot follow procedures and basically copy and paste. It’s impossible because of climate change and everything is different. But a lot of it changed with Meiram in my personal view, but I’m a bit biased because I used to work for him—I was an assistant winemaker in 2022, actually.

13:54 - 14:15

Amphorae Guide: But I see a lot of it towards his way of making. I think it’s a bit unfair for me to decide that because I wasn't a wine drinker in 2010.

Simon Jacob: What?!

Amphorae Guide: How is that possible? I’m young! I don’t have both ways to compare, but I can see from the people who come here regularly how it changes them.

14:15 - 14:41

Amphorae Guide: I have a very, very good customer that comes here every month or two, and he adores the old Makura and the Merlot Barbera and all the old vintage wines that we still made under Arkadi Papikian. And then every time he comes here, I just tell him: taste the Grenache Noir, taste the Asis. And you can see the light in his eyes. He is actually learning something new.

14:41 - 15:05

Amphorae Guide: So I think they don’t compete with each other. They just add to the repertoire. They complement each other. Let's taste the Ofek.

Simon Jacob: Yes, please. I really want to taste it.

Amphorae Guide: So this is the Ofek. Is this the flagship of the kosher? I would say it’s the most expensive one—160 NIS for consumer and 110 for all the rest.

15:05 - 15:30

Amphorae Guide: The white and the rosé are also 110. Around the Ofek—it’s interesting because I wouldn’t say there’s any wine that actually resembles it. It’s a mix of both worlds, just like we talked about. It’s a blend of Grenache Noir, Cabernet Franc, and Syrah. We have nothing like that in Amphorae.

15:30 - 15:58

Amphorae Guide: To me, it resembles like a mix between what we talked about—the Terroir that is Grenache Noir and the Rhyton which is an homage to Bordeaux which has a single strain Cabernet Franc. It's like a mix of both worlds, which makes it a lot more interesting because I’ve got nothing to compare it to. It gives that unique effect of the Ofek.

15:58 - 16:22

Amphorae Guide: I personally really like it because it has been in, I think, 20 months in oak barrels and it does not feel like it, which is good. It means it’s a very balanced wine. And I think for a first label, for a first try, it’s a really good base point.

16:22 - 16:47

Amphorae Guide: What I was saying about the Ofek—the blend itself, I actually don't know anything resembling it because Grenache Noir and Cabernet Franc usually don't mix. But it does work here. I think Syrah is just for the closing taste, but I think it’s mostly Grenache Noir and the Cabernet Franc that makes the impact.

16:47 - 17:15

Amphorae Guide: But it gives to anyone drinking Samuel—it gives an idea of what it actually is and what the difference in Israeli winemaking does. The rosé is very crisp, as you said, a lot of minerals and less sweeter fruit—it's not ripened fruit. It’s a lot of acidity and it's bone dry, and we're not ashamed of it. It’s exactly how we want it.

17:15 - 17:41

Amphorae Guide: And the white one actually has a lot of difference from Amphorae because we don't actually work with either Viognier or Clairette. I think this one was a test for Meiram, the winemaker that did this, to work with Viognier which he really likes. I love it. I love that mix. It's very perfumey and flowers, and it gives it that edge when we actually don't do it in the winery itself.

17:41 - 18:03

Simon Jacob: So if you use it as a service winery, which service winery do you use?

Amphorae Guide: We do it in the Ramat HaGolan. But we plan in the next years to have our own facility.

Simon Jacob: Actually, so the first winemaker was who? Arkadi?

Amphorae Guide: From the big part of Amphorae, it was Arkadi. There were a few before that. Gil Shatzberg? Really? Yeah, he was here for a few years.

18:03 - 18:27

Amphorae Guide: 2005 Amphorae was his making. I know it just because we did a tasting from the cellars and Meiram really liked it. So Gil lives here in Zichron, and Meiram did as well. So he brought him the wine the same day because he wanted to hear what he did. It was a Syrah meant to be like the table wine.

18:27 - 18:50

Amphorae Guide: And he wanted to open it to show what "vinegar" is. And it proved us all wrong. It was a day old. And he wanted to hear what he did, so they drank together after we tasted it. So it was Gil Shatzberg, but mostly the biggest years, the biggest impact because you’ve got to be here a few years to make an impact.

18:50 - 19:15

Amphorae Guide: Until you know how to work with what you’ve got, and the facility itself, and the tradition itself and bringing stuff to your own liking, it takes a while. So Meiram came here and for the first few years he did Arkadi wines, basically. But it took him, I’d say, 2019 was the first year he released a Mourvèdre, a single strain Mourvèdre. So that's three years already after coming here.

19:15 - 19:40

Amphorae Guide: And the Grenache Blanc he started making two years after. So it takes a while to take an impact.

Simon Jacob: I’ll give you what I say every time when we bring people down here to the cellar, but if you have any specific questions, do ask. Basically, in Israel it was hard for wineries to actually build cellars because most wineries weren't planned as a winery.

19:40 - 20:06

Simon Jacob: And we were lucky enough for this to be planned as a winery. It only looks like a very old house that was renovated; it’s been built in 2003. And it was meant to be a winery from the start. So this is the cellar. What we have here is basically an environment system that helps us maintain moisture and temperature.

20:06 - 20:30

Amphorae Guide: We have it on 11.8 Celsius through all year long. And what we do here basically is that’s the most important part of our winemaking in my opinion. Because what differentiates our white wines in Amphorae, beside the decision about the grapes, it’s about the method of winemaking. Everything over here is white.

20:30 - 20:53

Amphorae Guide: And as you can see on the top right, you can see that very long barrel, elongated. Yeah, exactly. That’s called a "cigar" barrel. A cigar barrel is meant for a method that’s called sur lie. I saw cigars, it’s called torpedo.

Simon Jacob: The shape is called torpedo. You know what torpedo is? The missile itself. The submarine.

20:53 - 21:18

Amphorae Guide: So it’s called a cigar barrel and it’s used to make wines that are made in sur lie. And we do a lot of our whites in sur lie. A lot of them. Even our most basic white wine, the Med White, the table wine, has some parts of it made in a barrel.

Simon Jacob: How do you do batonnage on a barrel like that?

Amphorae Guide: We climb up and we batonnage.

21:18 - 21:42

Amphorae Guide: That’s the advantage of a non-kosher winery. Because I can get—as I grew up here as a teenager in Kerem Maharal, I released from the army and I looked for any job. I came here to the visiting center seven or eight years ago and I started working here. I was a shift manager and then through a good relationship with Meiram, I was offered to join and learn.

21:42 - 22:07

Amphorae Guide: I don’t like textbooks; I like to know through my hands. And I did that for almost two years, one harvest. It allowed me to actually taste and smell and touch everything, just like we do topping here. You climb up there with a five-liter gallon and you just pour, and you hope you don't fall down when you climb down.

22:07 - 22:31

Simon Jacob: And you have some also big barrels as well, I see.

Amphorae Guide: Yeah, we’ve got 500s. Not a lot of them. Mostly for the big blends: the Velours, the Makura. But mostly like the Rhyton series that we talked about—because it’s an homage of Bordeaux, we only do it just like in Bordeaux in 225-liter. So yeah, those are magnums that are waiting to be labeled.

22:31 - 22:56

Amphorae Guide: And here when we talk about the barrels themselves, a lot of wineries choose "okay, we work with this, we work with that." We took the opportunity and we work with around eight to ten different brands of manufacturers of oak barrels. And they come through different forests and different methods of making, and we can see that here.

22:56 - 23:22

Amphorae Guide: You can see we’ve got Vicard and Saury and Ermitage and Berthomieu. They all have labels and it tells us everything we need to know about the barrel itself. "MT" is the toastiness of the barrel—that's medium toast. And "A" is the forest itself. If I’m not mistaken, A means Ambert, Artaige? I don’t remember it by heart.

23:22 - 23:48

Amphorae Guide: But we can see even other ones—let's see here, that's "B," that's the name of the forest. We have four different forests here that provide the oak barrels, and some of them are blends even: A-B, B-A, B-V. Forget about the grapes, the yeast, the method—only barrels can provide so much differentiators in the wine itself.

23:48 - 24:14

Simon Jacob: That's why you cannot copy anything from a year to a year, even if you did that. Meiram used to say it perfectly. He said, "Yes you can, but you’ll never know what did that effect." If you tasted this barrel and you would say, "Okay, this is good." Maybe it’s the yeast, maybe it’s the barrel, maybe it’s the year of the same barrel that was absolutely perfect.

24:14 - 24:40

Amphorae Guide: So it can be everything because it can be that part of the press—even when we press the grapes, it can be the free-run, the start of it, and it could be the hard press that made it. You cannot—absolutely cannot—translate it next year. It’s a lot about taste. You taste and you can see the potential and you learn from experience.

24:40 - 25:05

Amphorae Guide: And that’s the archive. Let's take a look. So that’s our archive. We bring every wine that we ever did, between 6 to 48 bottles, and we keep them here out of two reasons. One is for the winemakers themselves. There was Igor that came here and he wants to know how Arkadi did things. So he tasted the old Rhyton.

25:05 - 25:31

Amphorae Guide: He can taste it, and that’s a winemakers' archive. And besides everything, there’s a lot of ask for it—that people really want to buy stuff that is already vintage. And if they want to take the first bottle that we made—the Amphora Cabernet Sauvignon 1998, even before this building was up—he can purchase it.

25:31 - 25:56

Amphorae Guide: It’s available to him. Some of them are in very good shape and some of them are already done. And those that are done we do not sell, of course. That's just the tip of the iceberg of some of the wines. We’ve got like a Med Red from 2003. That's what I told you about the heritage—23 years ago they made a Med Red.

25:56 - 26:22

Amphorae Guide: Right now, I make a Med Red. They're not the same, but I have to keep some heritage in it to allow the customer to get used to it and to know what he likes—because he likes the Med Red. I cannot do a lot of change, but I can do slow changes.

Simon Jacob: That's full, because we use Coravin with it. Okay. The logo changed. Ah, that’s the old logo, yeah.

26:22 - 26:47

Amphorae Guide: Only until 2006 it was. "Amphora Vineyard" it was called. And I think that pretty much sums everything up unless you’ve got some questions.

Simon Jacob: Thank you very much, Ido.

Amphorae Guide: No problem, it’s my pleasure.

Simon Jacob: I hope this episode makes the wine at your next Shabbat table taste a whole lot better.

26:47 - 27:10

Simon Jacob: And to the rest of you listening, I want to hear from you too. The Kosher Terroir is an ongoing conversation. If there is a topic, a specific winery, or a wild wine myth you want me to unpack, reach out and let me know. If you enjoyed today’s episode, please do me a favor: just like a great bottle of wine, this podcast is meant to be shared.

27:10 - 27:38

Simon Jacob: Send this episode to the person who usually hosts you for Friday night dinner. Text it to your wine-loving friends. And please, take 30 seconds to hit that subscribe button and leave us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you’re listening. It is the absolute best way to help new listeners discover the show and to grow our incredible community.

27:38 - 28:02

Simon Jacob: Join us again next week. And until then, pour yourself something beautiful and remember: wine is a living thing. Sometimes it just needs a little room to breathe. L'chaim everyone! Have a wonderful week.

28:02 - 28:28

Simon Jacob: This is Simon Jacob again, your host of today’s episode of The Kosher Terroir. Please subscribe via your podcast provider to be informed of our new episodes as they are released. If you are new to The Kosher Terroir, please check out our many past episodes.