Transcript: The Dual Cradles of Wines Birth

[00:00] (Theme music plays)

[00:06] Simon Jacobs: Welcome to The Kosher Terroir. I'm Simon Jacob, your host for this episode from Jerusalem.

[00:15] 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.

[00:44] (Sound of a bottle hitting a table) Listen to that for a second. That's the sound of a bottle being set down on my table, and it lands a little harder than most because this is a heavy bottle. We'll come back to that because this particular bottle has traveled a very long way to reach my table here in Jerusalem. Not just a couple of borders, but across a few thousand years.

[01:23] Welcome to The Kosher Terroir. I'm so glad you're here because today's bottle came to me as a gift. And honestly, the story of how it arrived is half the reason we're doing this episode at all. It was brought back to me by two dear friends, Jay and Rachel Avilev. Jay is an acclaimed photographer, and he had just returned from his very first trip to the country of Georgia.

[01:58] Now, here's the lovely part. Before Jay ever went, he and I sat down and talked about Georgia because I had been there myself more than 40 years ago. I told him what I remembered, and what I remembered most was the land. Georgia is, hands down, some of the most beautiful country I have ever stood in. The Caucasus rising up behind the vineyards, these deep green valleys, and a quality of light that photographers chase their whole lives.

[02:37] We're both visual people, so of course, the two of us ended up down a rabbit hole about which lenses he should pack to do the scenery justice. But I told him about something else I found there all those years ago—something that has nothing to do with cameras. I told him about the Georgian Jewish community, one of the oldest Jewish communities in the world, with its own customs, its own melodies, and its own warmth. Jews had lived in those valleys for well over a thousand years. And I told him that in the decades since my visit, so much of that community had picked up and come home—come home to where? Here, to Israel.

[03:36] So, Jay went, and he fell head over heels for the place, exactly the way I'd hoped he would. The scenery, the mountains, the light. But he also got to do something that genuinely moved me when he told me about it: he experienced that Jewish community for himself—still there, still alive, still welcoming a stranger to the table all these years later. And knowing me, knowing my weakness for a good bottle, he came home and surprised me with this.

[04:18] He handed it to me wrapped in a paper sushi bag, of all things. And the first thing he said was, "Careful, hold it from the bottom." And the second I took it, I understood why—because this bottle is heavy. Surprisingly, almost comically heavy. You cradle it from its base, or you lose it through a hole in the bottom of the bag. And that heft, it turns out, is its own little clue to what's inside. But we'll come back to that too. Jay told me the man who sold it to him swore it was made the way his great-grandfather made it—in a clay pot in the ground.

[05:13] In a clay pot in the ground? Now, I've poured a lot of wine on this show, and I've talked about French oak, and stainless steel, and temperature-controlled everything. And here is a bottle whose entire claim to fame is that somebody buried it, on purpose. And that single, strange, wonderful idea—that you might make your finest wine by putting it in a clay vessel and lowering it into the earth—sent me down a rabbit hole that I have to share with you. Because once I started pulling that thread, I realized that this isn't just a story about Georgia; it's a story about two of the oldest wine-making cultures on planet Earth: the country of Georgia, tucked into the Caucasus Mountains, and the land of Israel, my own ancestral home.

[06:21] Two places, both making wine almost since the dawn of civilization, both reaching for clay. And yet, they made one completely opposite decision—a decision about where to put the wine while it was becoming wine. And that one choice tells you almost everything about who they were and what they wanted from the glass. One of them buried the wine. The other raised it up and put handles on it. And today, I want to figure out why, with this mystery bottle as our guide.

[07:11] So, here's the plan. First, I'm going to open this bottle live, right now, and give you my very first impressions. No overthinking, just a gut reaction. Then, we're going to travel back into the very beginning of wine itself—to the Georgian hillside thousands of years ago. We'll climb down into a buried clay vessel called a qvevri, and find out exactly how this stuff is made.

[07:49] Then, we'll go south to the wine presses carved into the bedrock of ancient Israel, and the great clay amphora that shipped Holy Land wine across the entire Mediterranean. We'll put the two traditions head-to-head. We'll talk about what all this means through a kosher lens, because wine in Jewish life is never just a drink. And then, at the very end, when you understand everything that went into it, we're going to come back to this glass and taste it properly together.

[08:34] All right, let me actually open this thing. (Sound of cork popping) And the label tells me what I was hoping for. This is a Saperavi. If you've never heard that word, Saperavi, it is Georgia's great red grape, the king of them all. And the name itself means something like "the dye," "the place of color." Hold on to that thought, okay? And the first pour. (Sound of wine pouring)

[09:21] Oh, now that is color. I want you to picture this with me because the color is the very first clue to the whole mystery. This is not a bright, see-through ruby you might have imagined; this is deep, this is dark, this pours out almost opaque—an inky, brooding purple-black, the color of crushed black cherries and pomegranates and old felt. When I tilt the glass against the light, the light barely makes it through. And the rim isn't pale and watery the way most reds go at the edge; it's stained a vivid magenta, as if the wine doesn't want to let go of the glass.

[10:23] And here is the first secret hiding in that color. Almost every red grape on Earth actually has clear juice. Squeeze it, and what runs out is practically colorless. All the red in your wine comes later, from soaking the juice on the dark skins. But, Saperavi is different. Saperavi is one of the rare handful of grapes the French call teinturier—a dyer. Its flesh is red too. Cut the berry in half, and it bleeds.

[11:08] So, when you take a grape that's already red to the core, and you ferment it the old Georgian way, buried in clay, with the skins and the seeds and even the stems for months on end, you get this—a wine so saturated it looks almost black in the glass. By the end of this episode, you'll be able to look at a pour like this from across the room and make a very good guess of how it was made. That's a promise.

[11:46] Let me just get my nose into it for a second. And a first sip. (Sound of sipping and swishing wine) Okay, I'm going to make myself stop right there because it's not fair to taste this properly until you know its story, and what a story it is. So, set this glass down with me, give it some air, and let's go back—all the way back—to the very beginning of wine.

[12:35] So, literally thousands of years ago. I keep saying that number, and I want to actually earn it because it's not marketing, it's archaeology. Picture a low hill in the South Caucasus, just south of what is today the Georgian capital, Tbilisi. The site has a name that sounds like a spell: Gadachrili Gora. About 10 years ago, a team of archaeologists was sifting through the remains of a Stone Age village there—a settlement of round mud-brick houses from around 6,000 years before the common era. And they kept turning up pieces of big ceramic jars.

[13:31] So, they did something clever: they scraped the residue off the inside of those ancient shards and sent it to the lab. And the lab found tartaric acid. Now, tartaric acid is, for all practical purposes, the chemical signature of grapes. Where you find it caked inside a 6,000-year-old jar, you have found wine. That discovery pushed the earliest hard evidence for winemaking back to roughly 6,000 BCE, which is how Georgia earned its title—the one you see on every bottle and every tourist poster—the Cradle of Wine. Not a cradle, the cradle.

[14:31] Wine in Georgia was never just a drink; it runs so deep that it wound right into the country's faith and very identity. For Georgians, the grapevine and the sacred are almost the same thing. Now, let's travel south to my part of the world because if Georgia is the cradle, the land of Israel and the wider Levant is wine's other ancient home. And the two stories are almost exactly as old as each other.

[15:13] And here, for a Jewish audience, the evidence isn't only in the ground; it's on the page. Open the Hebrew Bible, and wine is everywhere, right from the start. Think about Noah: the flood recedes, the whole world has been washed clean, humanity gets a second chance, and what is the very first thing Noah does when he steps onto dry land? The text says he becomes a man of the soil—he plants a vineyard. Of all things to do first, before anything else, he plants grapes.

[16:01] Or, think about the spies. When Moshe sends scouts ahead into the Promised Land to see what kind of place it is, they come back carrying proof of its richness. And the proof is a single cluster of grapes so enormous that the text tells us it had to be slung on a pole and carried between two men. One bunch of grapes—a two-man job. That image of the two men and a pole and a colossal cluster of fruit became the literal logo of the Israeli Tourism Ministry. The land was, from the beginning, a land of the vine.

[16:55] But here's the discovery that really brings it to life. In 2013, in the Western Galilee, at a site called Tel Kabri, a team of archaeologists was excavating the ruins of a grand palace—a palace from the Middle Bronze Age, around 1700 BCE. That's roughly 3,700 years ago. And digging through one of the rooms, they hit the lip of a large clay storage jar. A big one, about three feet tall. And then right next to it, another, and another, and another. By the time they were done, they had uncovered around 40 of these enormous jars lined up in a single enclosed room—40 jars, each one capable of holding the equivalent of dozens of modern bottles. They had walked into a 3,700-year-old royal wine cellar, one of the oldest and largest ever found anywhere in the region.

[18:19] And then, they did the modern magic: they sent the residue from the inside of those jars off for chemical analysis. The wine was long gone, of course, but its fingerprints were still there, soaked into the clay. And the results read like a recipe: yes, wine, but wine laced with honey and tree resins like terebinth and storax, with cedar oil and juniper, with hints of what might be mint or myrtle or even cinnamon. It was not a simple, rustic drink; it was a sophisticated, spiced, deliberately blended wine made for a king's table, with a consistency carefully repeated from jar to jar. Somebody three and a half millennia ago had a recipe and stuck to it.

[19:35] So, here's where we've arrived. Two cultures, two of the oldest winemaking traditions on Earth, give or take a thousand years of each other. Both of them reaching in their earliest days for the same humble material—clay. Both of them building entire civilizations, faiths, and feasts around the grape. And then, they came to a fork in the road—one single decision, and they went in opposite directions. The Georgians took their clay vessels and lowered them into the ground. The people of the Levant took their clay vessel, stood it up, put handles on it, and prepared it for traveling the world. Same fruit, same antiquity, opposite instincts. And to understand why and what each of them was really chasing in the glass, we need to climb down, literally, into the Georgian earth to meet the vessel that started the whole journey.

[21:05] Let me come back to my glass for just a moment. It's still evolving, good. Hold that thought because you're now going to understand where all this came from. We're going to climb down into the earth and meet the vessel at the center of this whole story. It's called a qvevri. That's Q-V-E-V-R-I. Again, you say roughly, "qvevri." And once you understand the qvevri, you understand Georgia.

[21:49] Picture an enormous clay egg—not a barrel, not a jar with a flat bottom—an egg, pointed at the base, swelling out in the middle, narrowing again to a round mouth at the top. Some of them are small, maybe the size of a beach ball, but the serious ones are huge. They can hold 1,000, 2,000, or even 3,500 liters of wine. The sweet spot, the size most winemakers love, holds somewhere around 1,000 to 1,200 liters. Imagine a clay vessel taller than you are.

[22:38] And here is the thing that makes it a qvevri and not just a big pot: it lives in the ground. The Georgians dig a pit, lower the vessel in, and bury it up to its neck so that only the round mouth sits flush with the floor. The word itself comes from the root that means, more or less, "buried deep in the ground." They keep these buried qvevris in a special cellar called a marani.

[23:17] And walking into a marani is one of the strangest, most beautiful experiences in wine. The floor is dotted with these round clay lids, like manhole covers, and under each one is a thousand liters of wine quietly working away in the dark. Some of those buried qvevris are older than the families tending them; they get passed down like heirlooms because you don't move a qvevri. Once it's in the ground, it's in the ground.

[23:57] And that raises a question almost nobody thinks to ask: who makes the qvevri itself? Because this is where the story gets a little bit sad and a little bit heroic. Making a qvevri is its own ancient craft, completely separate from making wine. And it is a craft that very nearly died out. At one point in the whole country of Georgia, there were only a tiny handful of master qvevri makers left—a few families, you could practically count them on your fingers.

[24:39] And what they do is extraordinary. A master takes a specific local clay and builds the vessel up by hand, coil by coil over weeks, letting each ring dry just enough to support the weight of the next. So, the giant egg slowly grows upward out of the floor of the workshop. And then, it has to be fired. But you can't easily slide a 3,000-liter clay egg into a kiln. So, traditionally, they build the fire around it in a great pit or a purpose-built furnace, and keep it roaring for days. Now, if you get the temperature wrong, then weeks of work cracks apart in an afternoon. This knowledge—the clay, the coiling, the firing, and the winemaking that goes with it—has been handed down inside families for thousands of years, parent to child, watching and doing.

[25:57] Okay, so you've got your buried clay egg. How does it actually make wine? And the answer is almost shockingly simple, which is the whole point. At harvest, you crush your grapes, and then, in the most traditional methods, everything goes into the qvevri—I mean everything. The juice, obviously, but also the skins, the seeds, and often the stems too. The Georgians have a word for all that solid material—chacha—and it goes right down into the vessel with the juice. There are no added yeasts, no laboratory cultures; the wild yeasts that live on the grape skins themselves do the work. And you seal the lid, and you walk away.

[27:03] And now, that buried earth does something no machine can do for free: the ground around the qvevri holds it at a cool, stable temperature, all on its own. No electricity, no refrigeration, no thermostat. The earth is the thermostat. The wine ferments gently down in the dark, and then it just stays there on all those skins, seeds, and stems for months—commonly five or six months of contact before the winemaker comes back to it. And by the way, that residual chacha at the bottom, they take it out and they distill it, and they make a drink called chacha, which is very popular within Georgia.

[28:10] And here is a part I find genuinely beautiful: the secret of the egg shape. While the wine is fermenting, the gentle heat creates slow currents inside the vessel. Because the qvevri is egg-shaped, those currents roll the wine around in a continuous, lazy circulation, keeping it in contact with the skins gently, without anyone lifting a finger. And then, when fermentation finishes and everything goes calm, that same pointed shape becomes a trap. All the solids, all the spent skins and seeds, sink and gather in a narrow point at the very bottom, which leaves the wine above clear. The shape does the stirring and the filtering both. Thousands of years ago, with no science at all, they arrived at a form that is, frankly, perfect.

[29:33] And one more touch. Because the clay is fired at a relatively low temperature, it stays slightly porous; it can breathe just a little, letting in the faintest whispers of oxygen, which soften and round the wine. So, you don't want it so porous that your wine leaks away into the soil. So, the qvevri is lined by hand with hot beeswax, sealing the surface while still letting it breathe. Clay and beeswax and earth—that's the whole technology. That's it.

[30:26] Now, step back and let's look at what we've just described, because it adds up to a philosophy. The winemaker's hands barely touch the wine. There's no added yeast, no temperature control, no filtering—often nothing at all. The vessel and the earth do all the work. Today, there's a whole fashionable movement around what we call natural wines—low intervention, hands off, let the grape speak. The Georgians have been doing it for thousands of years. They were natural wine people thousands of years before it had a hashtag.

[31:21] Notice something else. That clay egg in the ground does the whole job: it ferments the wine, it ages the wine, it stores the wine, all in the same buried place. The vessel isn't a container the wine passes through on its way to somewhere else; the vessel is part of the wine. It never moves; it's never going anywhere. And what's the goal of all of this? What kind of wine is the Georgian winemaker actually chasing? Structure, depth, grip. By fermenting on those skins and seeds and the stems, you pull out tannins and texture and savory power.

[32:27] Remember, my bottle is a red grape that's already red to its core. So, you can imagine just how much color and grip and density comes pouring out of it after months down in the clay. The Georgians weren't trying to make something delicate or fleeting, to be sipped young and forgotten; they were making a wine of place—bold, earthy, structured, built to stand up to a table full of food, and to last—a wine, you might say, with weight. Weight. Hold on to that word, and that heavy bottle in the sushi bag. We'll come back to it, but first we need to travel south again because while Georgia was burying its wine in the ground, the people of the ancient Levant were doing something almost completely opposite. And to see why, we have to start not with a clay pot, but with a hole carved in solid rock.

[33:57] So, we leave the cool, dark, buried world of the Georgian marani, and we travel south into the sun—into the hills of Israel and the wider Levant. And the very first thing you notice is that here, the story of wine does not begin with a clay pot at all; it begins with a hole carved into solid rock. If you go hiking in the hills of Israel today—through the Judean Hills, up in the Galilee, out towards the coast—you will, sooner or later, walk right past an ancient wine press without even realizing it. They're everywhere.

[34:49] The Hebrew word is gat, and a gat is, at its simplest, a shallow basin cut in the bedrock—a flat treading floor where you dump grapes and crush them the old way, with bare feet. From the upper floor, a carved channel runs downhill into a second lower basin. You tread the grapes up top, the juice runs down the channel and collects in a vat below. Gravity does the work.

[35:32] These things are old. Near Tel Megiddo in the north, archaeologists have found wine presses carved from bedrock from about 5,000 years ago, among the oldest of their kind ever found in the land. And the image is woven right through the Hebrew Bible. When the prophets want a picture of judgment, they reach for someone treading the wine press, the red juice splashing up their legs. When Isaiah wants to sing about God and Israel, he sings a love song about a man who plants a vineyard on a fertile hill and carves out a wine press in the middle of it. That carved rock basin was so familiar to ancient ears that it could stand for the whole relationship between the people and their God.

[36:44] And right here is the first crucial difference from Georgia. Stop and notice it. In Georgia, you crush the grapes, and everything goes into a single vessel, the qvevri, where it ferments, ages, and is stored, all in one place in the ground. But here in the Levant, the place where you crush and ferment the wine, that rock-cut press, is a completely different object from the place where you'll keep it. You make the wine in stone, and then you move it. And what you move it into is the second great character in our story—the jar, the amphora.

[37:46] Now, the Levantine storage jar and the Georgian qvevri are cousins, both born of clay, both ancient. But they are built for opposite assumptions, and you can read the difference with your own two eyes. The qvevri is buried, and it has no handles because it is never going to move. The amphora does exactly the reverse: it stands up above ground, in cellars, in warehouses, and in ships' holds, and it has handles—two of them, usually right at the neck. Handles. Such a small thing, and it tells you everything. You don't put handles on something you intend to bury and leave alone for a generation. You put handles on something you intend to grab and lift and carry, and load into the back of a donkey or the deck of a ship. The amphora was, in a very real sense, the cardboard box of the ancient world—the shipping container engineered to be sealed, stacked, and sent out into the world.

[39:11] And they were sealed properly, the mouths were stoppered, sometimes with clay, sometimes even with cork. And then, gorgeously, many of them were labeled. Archaeologists have found jars inscribed with the vintage, with the type of grape, even the name of the producer. 3,000 years before the modern wine label, somebody was scratching into the clay, in effect, "estate wine, this grape, this year." The world's first back label, baked onto the side of the bottle. And once you can ship your wine, everything changes because now wine isn't just something you make for your own table; it's an export, it's money. And the people of this land became spectacularly good at it.

[40:20] Here is a story that still amazes me. In the Byzantine period, 1,500–1,600 years ago, some of the most prized wine in the entire Mediterranean came from, of all places, the Negev Desert—the desert, in cities with names like Avdat, and Shivta, and Haluza. Out of the country so dry, you'd swear nothing could grow, people built ingenious systems to capture every drop of runoff and channel it to their vines, and produced a sweet, pale, celebrated white wine. And they shipped it across the sea in a distinctive, tall, narrow clay jar that everyone recognized—the so-called Gaza jar, because it went out through the port of Gaza.

[41:31] The wine inside even had a brand name in the Roman world: Vinum Gazetum, Gaza wine. People in what is now France, and England, and Italy were drinking wine grown in the Israeli desert and carried to them in these clay jars. And that's the power of the handle. Just a few years ago, in 2021, archaeologists in the town of Yavne, in Israel's coastal plain, uncovered a factory floor of this whole operation—and I do mean factory.

[42:19] They found a 1,500-year-old winemaking complex with five massive wine presses, each one big enough that you could fit a small house inside it. They found vast warehouses for aging and bottling the wine. And this is the detail that stopped me cold: they found the kilns right there on site for firing the Gaza jars themselves. They made the jars and the wine in the same place, like a brewery with its own bottling plant attached. The archaeologists estimated this single complex could produce something like two million liters of wine a year—that's 15 centuries ago. This was industrial-scale export winemaking, a world away from a family tending a few buried qvevris in the village cellar.

[43:35] But shipping wine across a hot sea in a clay jar creates a problem the Georgians, with their cool buried vessels, simply didn't have: heat, oxygen, time on the road. A wine standing in a jar in the Mediterranean sun, sloshing around in a ship's hold for weeks, is a wine in serious danger of turning to vinegar before it ever reaches the customer. So, the Levantine winemakers became masters of preservation and flavor. Think back to the royal cellar at Tel Kabri and its recipe: wine laced with honey and tree resin, with herbs and cedar and juniper. That wasn't only about taste; resins are natural preservatives, they fight spoilage. Sealing a jar with pine resin or pitch both protected the wine and flavored it. And if you've ever tasted Greek retsina with its piney edge, you've tasted a living echo of that ancient trick.

[45:07] When the Georgian instinct was to add nothing and let the buried earth protect the wine, the Levantine instinct was to reach for honey and resin and herbs, and actively build a wine that could survive a journey and arrive delicious. The resin wasn't the only weapon; the ancient winemakers had another, and it was sitting right there in the fruit—sugar. Think about it: the sweetest wines were often the most stable, for exactly the same reason that honey never spoils and jam keeps all winter. Pack enough sugar into a liquid, and there's simply no room left for the microbes to turn wine into vinegar. So, across the ancient world, winemakers leaned into sweetness on purpose.

[46:11] They made raisin wine, the Romans called it passum, by drying the grapes in the sun until they were shriveled little bombs of concentrated sugar before pressing them. They boiled the grape juice down into a thick, sweet syrup to stir back into the weaker wine. And they made honeyed wine outright, the Romans called it mulsum—honey and grape together in the cup. Now, that should ring a bell because that's exactly what we found in the royal cellar in Tel Kabri—wine laced with honey. The sweetest, richest, most concentrated wines weren't just luxuries for the king's table; they were also quietly the ones most likely to survive. Sweet meant special, and sweet meant it lasted.

[47:24] Now, if you keep a Jewish home, you may already be thinking about the cup of sweet wine you lift for Kiddush, and wondering whether there's a thread running from those ancient honeyed wines all the way to your Shabbat table. Hold that thought, hold it tight, because we're going to come back to it. And the answer is more surprising than you'd guess when we look at all this through the kosher lens.

[48:02] So, look at what the Levantine winemakers were really chasing: not a wild, structured, buried wine of one particular place. They wanted a wine that was stable, that was flavored, that was reliable batch after batch, that could be sealed and labeled and stacked and sold—a wine for the table, yes, and for the Temple, but also a wine that could go out and meet the world. Their whole technology pointed outward. And that's our conclusion. Two ancient peoples, the same fruit, the same clay, and one of them pointing the wine down into the ground and the other pointing it out towards the sea. So, let's put them side-by-side properly and ask what each choice really cost and really gave.

[49:15] All right, let's put them on the table side-by-side: the Georgian qvevri and the Levantine amphora. Same raw material, clay; same age, give or take, the dawn of civilization. And I want to walk through this difference one piece at a time because every single contrast flows from that one original choice—to bury or not to bury. Start with the obvious one: the qvevri is sunk into the ground up to its neck. The amphora stands above ground, in the open air of the cellar or the warehouse or the ship. One is swallowed by the earth, and the other is exposed to the world. Everything else, and I mean everything, flows from that.

[50:23] Here is what I think is the single most important and most underappreciated difference between these two worlds, and it comes down to two enemies that every winemaker in history has had to fight: heat and oxygen. Together, those two are what turn wine old before its time. They're what take a bright, living wine and push it towards brown, towards flat, towards nutty, towards stale, and eventually all the way to vinegar. Heat speeds everything up; oxygen does the damage. And the warmer the wine, the faster the oxygen does its work.

[51:24] Now, think about the poor Levantine amphora. It's standing above ground in a hot Mediterranean climate. The sun beats on the warehouse, and the temperature swings up every afternoon and down every night. And that warmth is constantly driving the wine to evaporate and oxidize. The clay walls breathe, and the wine slowly seeps and evaporates through them, and the air works its way in to take its place. Winemakers actually had to fight this. In some traditions, they'd drape the jars and pour water over the outside, letting the evaporation cool them down just to slow the damage. Leave an amphora unattended in the heat, and you get exactly those oxidative, sherry-like, prematurely aged flavors creeping in. And it's the same basic problem, by the way, with a wooden barrel. A barrel sits out in the open; it lets oxygen seep through the wood. It loses wine to evaporation. Vinners romantically call this loss the "angels' share." The angels, it turns out, are drinking your wine because it's warm and exposed.

[53:14] And now, picture the qvevri. It's buried; it is wrapped on every side in the cool, dense, stable embrace of the earth. While the world above is baking at noon and chilling at midnight, down in the ground, the temperature barely moves—cool and steady, day after day, season after season. And that stability is the secret weapon because the wine is kept cool and constant. The twin engines of heat and oxidation are throttled right down. There is very little evaporation. There is very little temperature stress. The buried egg is, in effect, a naturally refrigerated, sealed cocoon. And the Georgians achieved it thousands of years ago with nothing but a hole in the ground.

[54:33] Now, I want to be precise here because it's subtle and beautiful. Burying a qvevri does not seal the wine off from oxygen completely, and you wouldn't want to. The clay is gently porous, so a faint, slow whisper of air still reaches the wine. And that tiny bit of breathing is what softens it, and rounds it, and gives the qvevri wine its lovely, supple texture. The genius is that the burial specialty separates the two enemies: you keep the gentle, civilized kiss of oxygen, but because the earth holds the wine cool and still, you strip out the heat that would otherwise turn that kiss into decay. Gentle oxygen without the heat-driven oxidation. An amphora standing in the sun couldn't dream of that balance. The barrel can't either. Only the buried vessel pulls it off.

[56:06] And honestly, keep that in your back pocket because we are going to come back to it at the very end of this episode, when we taste what it actually did to the wine in my glass. Now, if you've actually drunk much Georgian wine in the past, you might be frowning at your speaker right about now because here's the catch I owe you: a lot of traditional Georgian wines, especially the amber, skin-contact whites, taste distinctly oxidative—nutty, like walnut and dried apricot and old, steeped tea. So, how on Earth do I square that with everything else I just told you about the buried vessels protecting the wine from oxidation?

[57:15] And the answer is that there are two completely different things hiding inside that one word, oxidation. There's oxidation the fault—the flat, stale, stewed, vinegary character of a wine that's been wrecked by heat. And there's oxidative the style—a deliberate, savory, nutty, dried-fruit profile that some winemakers chase on purpose. And here's the key: burying the qvevri fights the first one. It holds the wine cool and stable, so heat can't ruin it. But the rest of the traditional method—those long months soaking on the skins and the seeds, the gently porous clay, and the old habit of adding little or no sulfur, which is the main antioxidant tool everywhere else in the world—all that nudges the wine towards the second one: the oxidative style, on purpose.

[58:36] So, a Georgian amber wine that tastes nutty and savory isn't broken; it isn't heat-damaged. It's wearing its tradition on its sleeve. The earth protected it from spoilage; the method gave it that character deliberately. Oxidative, not oxidized. And that's the distinction worth holding on to, especially because when we get to my glass at the end, my wine is a red Saperavi, loaded with the tannins and the dark pigment that fight oxidation harder than anything. So, it may show far less of that character than those amber whites do. We'll find out together. But either way, now you'll know exactly what you're tasting and why.

[59:52] Next axis. In Georgia, the qvevri does the entire job: it ferments the wine, it ages the wine, and it stores the wine, all in the same buried spot. The vessel isn't a container the wine passes through on its way to somewhere else; the vessel is part of the wine. It never moves; it's never going anywhere. In the Levant, the press makes the wine, and the amphora stores and ships it. Two different objects, two different jobs. The qvevri is a home; the amphora is a vehicle. One has no handles because it never moves. The other has handles because moving is the entire point.

[1:01:03] Then, there's the hand of the winemaker. The Georgian approach is radically hands-off: wild yeast, no additives, let the skins and the seeds and the earth do the work, and trust the process for months. The Levantine approach is hands-on, actively building the wine with honey and resins and herbs, partly for flavor and partly to preserve it for the journey. One says, "Add nothing, the place will speak." The other says, "I will shape this wine so it survives and arrives delicious." Neither is lazy, and neither is cheating; they're answering two different questions.

[1:02:13] And that's really what it all comes down to—what each winemaker actually wants in the glass. The Georgian wants a wine of place—structured, deep, savory, a little wild, built to last and to sit at the center of the feast in the village where it was born. The wine points inward and downward, into the earth, into the family, into one particular hillside. The Levantine wanted a wine for the world—stable, flavored, consistent batch after batch, capable of being sealed and labeled and stacked and sold, a wine for the table, yes, and for the Temple, but also a wine that could go out and meet the world. Their whole technology pointed outward.

[1:03:32] And that's our conclusion. Two ancient peoples, the same fruit, the same clay, and one of them pointing the wine down into the ground, and the other pointing it out towards the sea. So, let's put them side-by-side properly and ask what each choice really cost and really gave. All right, let's put them on the table side-by-side: the Georgian qvevri and the Levantine amphora. Same raw material, clay; same age, give or take, the dawn of civilization. And I want to walk through this difference one piece at a time because every single contrast flows from that one original choice—to bury or not to bury.

[1:04:47] But there's a third thread running quietly underneath this whole story—one that on this show we can never leave alone. Because for the Jewish people, wine was never about trade, or flavor, or even pleasure. Wine was holy. Wine sat at the very center of how we mark time, how we pray, how we sanctify a meal, a marriage, and a Shabbat. So, what happens when you take these two ancient ways of making wine—a buried egg and a standing jar—and you look at them through a kosher lens? That's what we're going to do next.

[1:05:46] This is the part of the story that for me sits closest to home because everything we've talked about so far—the buried egg, the standing jar, the trade routes, the chemistry of oxidation—all of it lives for the Jewish people inside a much bigger idea: the idea that wine is holy. Now, I'm not going to walk you through Kiddush, or the four cups at the Seder, or the cup we bless under the wedding canopy. You all know that. You live it. What I want to point out is the deeper fact sitting underneath all of it—that wine, alone among the things we eat and drink, is what we reach for to sanctify our holiest moments.

[1:06:49] Go all the way back to the Temple in Jerusalem, and you find wine being poured out as a libation—the nesachim—alongside the daily offerings. Wine was quite literally part of the service of God. So, wine in our tradition is never neutral. It's a cup we lift to mark the holiest moments we have. And precisely because it carries that weight, our law guards it more carefully than almost any other thing we put in our mouths.

[1:07:37] And here's something that surprises a lot of people, even people who keep kosher their whole lives. With almost every kosher food, what matters is what it is and what's in it. A piece of fruit is kosher; a vegetable is kosher. But wine is the strange exception because with wine, it matters who handles it. Why? The roots go back to the ancient world we've been walking through this whole episode—the world where wine wasn't just poured at a dinner, it was poured out to idols. Libations to pagan gods were so bound up with wine that the Sages drew a hard line around it. Wine that had been used, or might have been used, in idolatrous worship was forbidden. That's the category the tradition calls yayin nesech. And as a protective fence around that, they extended it further to ordinary wine handled by those outside the community.

[1:09:07] The upshot, in practical terms today, is for wine to be kosher, it has to be handled from the moment the grapes are crushed all the way to the sealed bottle only by Jews. Think about the beautiful irony here: the very thing that made wine dangerous in the ancient world—that it was holy enough to offer to a god—is the same thing that makes us hold it so closely today. There's more to it, of course, and especially here in the land of Israel where wine carries extra layers of law you already know well—orlah, the tithes, the rules of the Shmita year, and the whole question of mevushal. I'll trust that you know all about that.

[1:10:14] What I'd rather spend our time on is the part that surprises even people who've kept kosher their whole lives, starting with the question I promised you I'd come back to. Okay, I've told you to hold that thought about sweet wine. Here it is, and it's one of my favorite little pieces of the whole story because the popular answer is almost entirely wrong, and the real answer is so much better.

[1:10:55] A lot of people assume the sweet wine in the Kiddush cup is a direct descendant of those ancient honeyed wines, that we've been drinking sweet sacramental wine since biblical times, kept sweet to preserve it from one Shabbat to the next without a refrigerator. It's a lovely theory, and it's mostly a myth, in two ways. First, that syrupy, sweet wine that most of us picture—the Manischewitz on your grandparents' table—is not ancient at all. It's a modern American accident.

[1:11:47] When Jewish immigrants needed a wine in the northeastern United States, the grape that grew best was the Concord. Intensely acidic, musky, frankly almost undrinkable on its own, so they buried it in sugar just to make it palatable. Then, Prohibition arrived with a special legal exemption for sacramental wine. The sweet Concord wine became the iconic Jewish wine, sealed into legend when the Manischewitz name went onto it in the 1940s. The tradition is about a century and a half old, not the thousands we've been talking about.

[1:12:47] Second, the gentler correction: fermented wine doesn't actually need saving from week to week. Once it's wine, the alcohol and the acidity keep it stable for months in a sealed bottle. The real preservation battle in the ancient world wasn't Friday to Friday on the shelf; it was the long haul and the sea voyage. And that's what the resins and the boiled-down syrups were fighting. And one bit of housekeeping: honey sweetens wines, it doesn't fortify it. Fortifying—spiking wine with distilled spirits the way port is made—needs distillation, and that's a much later, medieval invention. The ancients sweetened and concentrated; they couldn't fortify.

[1:13:58] But here's why I love this: your instinct, underneath, is all exactly right. Sweet wine on the Jewish table really is ancient; it just got there by a different road than preservation. For one thing, there's a beautiful principle in Jewish life called Hiddur Mitzvah—beautifying the commandment, doing it not just adequately but gorgeously. And for a cup you're going to make holy, you reach for the finest wine you have. And in the ancient world, the finest, most prestigious wine was the rich, sweet, concentrated kind. On top of that, for centuries, in communities where good wine grapes were scarce, Jews made raisin wine, which is naturally deeply sweet. So, a sweet cup of Kiddush is genuinely old. It just comes down to us through honor and availability, and through that very ancient conviction that sweeter was better, not through some weekly fight with spoilage.

[1:15:43] Now, hold both halves of this episode in your mind at once because here is where they collide in a most interesting way. We said the whole genesis of the qvevri is that it's hands-off: you crush the grapes, you fill the vessel, you seal it, you bury it, and then you walk away for five or six months and let the earth and the wild yeast do everything. Minimal human intervention—that's the entire philosophy. But kosher wine requires the opposite instinct: it requires Jewish hands present and responsible at every active step of production. So, at first glance, you'd think these two ideas are in tension. How on Earth do you keep a wine kosher when its whole method is to leave it alone underground for half a year?

[1:16:59] And then, you turn it over and you realize that a qvevri might be the most naturally kosher-friendly vessel ever invented. Because think about it: what "leave it alone" actually means—the hands-on moments, the crush, the filling of the vessel, the sealing, and later, the opening and drawing off the wine—those are discrete, identifiable steps, and a Jew can own every one of them. And in between? In between, nobody touches the wine. It isn't being racked, pumped, fined, or fiddled with by dozens of hands. It's locked away in the dark, in the earth, under a sealed clay lid, doing its work in total solitude. The wine, in a sense, supervises itself. The very hands-offness that defines the qvevri turns out to mean fewer points where anything has to be guarded at all.

[1:18:24] There is, though, one genuinely tricky wrinkle, and it's the perfect marriage of the ancient and the legal. Remember how we said the qvevri clay is porous, that it breathes, that it soaks things up? Well, in kosher law, a porous earthware vessel is a real concern precisely because it absorbs. Once unglazed clay has soaked up non-kosher wine deep in its walls, you generally cannot scrub or boil that out. The vessel remembers what it held. So, you can't simply take an old village qvevri that's held generations of non-kosher wine and start making kosher wine in it. For a kosher qvevri wine, you need a vessel that is new or dedicated, one that has only known kosher wine. The beeswax lining helps form a barrier, but the underlying principle is beautiful: the clay has a memory, and kosher law takes that memory seriously.

[1:20:00] So, is any of this actually happening? Is anyone making kosher wine the ancient way in clay? And the wonderful answer is yes. It's happening on both sides of our story right now. In Georgia itself, producers have started making kosher wine from the great Saperavi grape. The Badagoni Winery, for instance, has been producing a kosher Saperavi since around 2018. So, the very tradition we've been describing, the buried egg tradition, is now reaching kosher tables. And remember the thread from the start of this episode: the ancient Georgian Jewish community that has so largely come home to Israel. There's something deeply moving in that. The Jews of Georgia drank that wine of the land for over 2,000 years, and now, whether in Tbilisi or in Jerusalem, that wine can come to the Shabbat table fully kosher.

[1:21:29] So, here we are, back where we started—this glass of Saperavi, Jay and Rachel's gift, that I poured almost an hour ago and have been letting breathe this whole time. And now you know the whole story: you know about the buried egg, the wild yeast, the months in the dark, the cool, steady earth holding it all together. Let's finally taste it properly, slowly, and see what thousands of years actually put into the glass.

[1:22:20] And before I even lift the glass, let me pick up the bottle one more time. Remember how heavy it was? "Hold on to it from the bottom," Jay said. There's a little secret to that heft. The bottle is heavy, with a deep punt in the base. It's a signal. Wineries reserve glass like this for wines they consider serious—wines built to age, wines meant to be taken seriously and laid down for years. The weight in your hand is the winemaker telling you, before you've even pulled the cork, "This is not a wine to gulp and forget; this is a wine with ambition." And after everything we've learned about how it's made, that ambition makes complete sense.

[1:23:36] Now, the glass. Look at the color again, but look at it with new eyes. That deep, opaque, inky, purple-black with the vivid magenta rim. An hour ago, I told you the color was a clue. Now, you can read it. That saturation is Saperavi being a teinturier—red to its very core. And it's the months of fermenting on the skins, the seeds, the stems down in the qvevri, pulling out every bit of pigment the grape has to give. You're not just looking at a dark wine; you're looking at what a buried egg made visible.

[1:24:43] Now, let me get my nose right down into it. Oh, there's a lot going on here. The first wave is dark fruit, but not sweet, jammy, or candied fruit. This is brooding: black cherry, ripe blackberry, a little crushed blueberry, dark plum. And then, underneath the fruit, the savory layer rolls in, and that's where the qvevri really announces itself: dried herbs, a little bit of tobacco leaf, something earthy and almost stony, a hint of skin—maybe a walnut skin—a whisper of violet and dried fruit. It's fruit and earth at the same time, the wine wearing a bit of dust on its boots. But it is so, so, so young. This wine has so much more to offer.

[1:26:11] And the first sip. (Sound of wine swishing) There it is, I knew it. The first thing is the feeling of structure and grip, but the tannins are so firm and so real, drying out the sides of my mouth exactly the way I thought. But again, this is so, so young. Saperavi also keeps this bright, almost tart-like acidity running right down the middle. So, even with all that dark color, all that grip, all that density, the wine feels alive—lifted, not heavy or flabby. It's muscular and fresh at the same time, but it's totally, totally too young.

[1:27:18] And this—this right here—is the moment to remember everything we said about burying a wine. Tasting carefully, there are two very different things that are both going on in the name of oxidation. And the Georgian wine can show you either one. The first is the fault—tired, flat, stewed—the taste of wine cooked by heat and gone over the hill. But not in this wine. The second is the style. I'm getting some of that savory, nutty, dried-fruit edge curling around the dark fruit. And I want to be absolutely clear about something: that is not a flaw. The wine is not off; the character is the signature of traditional Georgian winemaking—months on the skins and seeds, the porous clay vessel, little or no sulfur. The old way courts the walnut and tea character on purpose.

[1:28:44] Now, if you want to really feel the arc of this episode, do what I've done tonight and poured a second glass besides it—an Israeli amphora wine—to set it against the Georgian one. I've got a glass of Gvaot's Gofna, with its old vine Carignan raised in amphora. It is a blend, but tasting them side-by-side is like hearing two members of the same family who grew up in different countries. The Georgian Saperavi is deep, dark, brooding, structured—the buried wine, all earth and gravity.

[1:29:43] The Israeli Carignan blend, raised in amphora above ground on a sun-drenched Judean hillside, comes at you brighter and more lifted: red fruit, Mediterranean herbs, that warm garrigue character of the hills, with the clay giving it this lovely, soft, supple texture. Two clay wines, two ancient lands—one pulled down into the cool earth and the other raised up in the warm Mediterranean light. And you can taste that difference; you can taste north and south, you can taste buried and standing. It's all there in the two glasses.

[1:30:52] So, the verdict: did thousands of years earn their keep? Was the buried egg worth it? For me, this is a resounding yes. This is a wine with a sense of place you simply cannot fake and cannot rush—earthy and structured, and alive all at once—the taste of the method so old it predates almost everything we call civilization. And yet, so right that we're still doing it unchanged today. Would it grace my Shabbat table? In a heartbeat. Would I lift up a cup for Kiddush and feel the whole weight of history in it? Without a question.

[1:31:54] Jay, Rachel, thank you. You didn't just bring me a bottle of wine; you brought me thousands of years wrapped up in a sushi bag. Two ancient peoples, the same fruit, the same humble clay, and one of them lowered their wine into the ground and the other raised theirs up into the Mediterranean light and sent it out to sea. For thousands of years, these two traditions ran side-by-side, almost never touching. And tonight, in a glass on my table in Jerusalem, they finally met—a Georgian Saperavi born in a buried egg of clay, brought home by a friend who fell in love with the same hillsides I fell in love with 40 years ago. Sometimes, a bottle is just a bottle. And sometimes, if you sit with it long enough, it turns out to hold an entire civilization.

[1:33:17] And here's the thread I keep coming back to: both these cultures, the Georgian and the Jewish, landed in the very same place about what wine is actually for. It isn't for drinking alone; it's the thing we put in the center of the table so that people will gather around it. The Georgian raises his glass and toasts the whole room; we lift our cup for Kiddush, and the whole family leans in. Wine is an excuse to bring the people you love close.

[1:34:03] Which is exactly why I'm going to ask you for something special tonight. If this episode moved you, if you learned something, or felt something, or even just got thirsty, then there's almost certainly someone in your life who would love to listen to it too—the friend who gets geeked out over wine, the one who loves history, the person at your Shabbat table who always asks the best questions. Do me a favor: send them this episode. Text it to them right now while you're thinking of it. That's how The Kosher Terroir grows—not through some algorithm, but the old way, the human way, one person handing a good thing to another, exactly the way Jay handed me that bottle. You passing this show to a friend is the same as your pouring a glass and inviting them to the table.

[1:35:12] And if you're new here, if this is your first time at the table, welcome. Follow the show, subscribe wherever you're listening right now, so that the next bottle lands in your feed the moment it's ready. We go all over the map on this show—all over the world of wine and Jewish life and the places they overlap—and you do not want to miss where we're headed next. And if you've got half a minute, leaving a rating or a review genuinely, truly helps new listeners find us. It's the kindest thing you can do for a show you enjoy.

[1:36:06] I also want to hear from you. If you have ever been handed a bottle that carried a whole story with it—a wine from a trip, a gift from someone you love, something you've been saving—write to me, tell me about it. I read every message, and your bottle might just become a future episode. And if you want to taste tonight's journey for yourself, check the show notes. I've put together where to look for Georgian wines and the Gofna from the Judean Hills so that you can check out this story at your own table.

[1:36:53] Thank you, as always, for spending this time with me. And a special thank you to Jay and Rachel Avilev for the gift that started it all. Wherever you are, whatever you're pouring tonight, may it be a wine with a story, and may you have someone you love to share it with. L'chaim to life, I'll see you next time.

[1:37:37] (Theme music plays)

[1:37:48] Simon Jacobs: This is Simon Jacobs 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.

[1:38:15] (Theme music fades out)