The Kosher Terroir

Season 4, Episode 28: Wine Out of the Sanctuary and Into the Backyard

Host: Simon Jacob

Location: Jerusalem

Introduction: A Series of Small, Delicious Heresies

[00:09]

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

There's a bottle of wine somewhere on this earth that a winemaker bled over for two years of his life. He watched the weather like a worried parent. He pulled berries off the vine and chewed the seeds to taste the tannins. He lost sleep over one rainstorm in September. And tonight, on this program, I am going to pour cola into a glass of wine.

Stay with me, because by the end of this episode, you're not only going to forgive me—you're going to do it yourself on your own porch, and you're going to be delighted.

This is The Kosher Terroir. I'm Simon Jacob, and today we are taking wine out of the sanctuary and into the backyard. Cocktails, sangria, frozen rosé, and a glass that's sweating in the sun. We're going to taste the wines that were born for this, build a few drinks that'll make you look like a genius, match them to every long weekend in your summer calendar, and along the way, I'm going to commit a series of small, delicious heresies. We'll keep count. Pour something cold, and let's begin.

Dismantling Wine Snobbery: The Golden Rule

[02:06]

Let me deal with the snob in the room first—and the snob in the room might be you. That's fine; it was me too for about fifteen years.

There's a feeling if you love wine that mixing it with anything is a kind of vandalism. That the winemaker's whole job is to capture a place and a season in a bottle, and your whole job is to receive that quietly, ideally with the right glass and a respectful silence. And cutting it with soda and orange slices? That's spitting in the sanctuary.

I want to dismantle that because it rests on one mistake: the assumption that all wine is the same kind of thing. It isn't. Here's the rule that resolves the whole argument, and I want you to write it on your heart:

You never mix your library bottles. You mix the wine that was made to be mixed.

Those are two different products that happen to share a name. The age-worthy, structured, contemplative bottle—the one with something to say—you leave that one alone. You give it your attention. But the bright, young, cheerful bottle that was made to be drunk this summer and not a summer later? That wine wants to go in a pitcher. Using it for sangria isn't a desecration; it's an honest, correct use of the thing.

And this is not some modern degeneracy, by the way. Sangria and its cousins go back centuries: wine cut with water, with fruit, with spice, long before refrigeration, all around the Mediterranean. An entire wine culture, the Veneto in northern Italy, basically runs on the spritz at six o'clock in the evening. These are not corruptions of wine culture; they are wine culture. The snobbery is a recent invention.

• Heresy Count: That's heresy number one. And it wasn't even a heresy—mixing humble wine is just correct. We're warming up.

The Winemaker's Checklist for Mixing Wine

[04:41]

Okay, so if some wine is built for this, what is the build? What am I, as a winemaker or consumer, actually looking for when I pick up a bottle to mix? Let me give you the checklist, because once you have it, you'll never buy the wrong bottle for a party again:

1. Acidity: High acid—this is the whole game. The moment you add sugar—and fruit is sugar, soda is sugar, and a sweet liqueur is sugar—you need acid to push back, or the drink goes flat and flabby, and cloying in your mouth. Acidity is the spine. A wine that tastes a little too tart on its own, a little austere, a little lean, is very often the perfect base. Keep that in your pocket; it's counterintuitive, and it's gold.
2. Fruit-Forward and Easy on the Oak: You want a wine that leads with bright fruit, not that leads with barrel. Because you're about to add citrus and herbs, and maybe a spirit, and the last thing you want is a heavy vanilla and toast oak in the wrestling match with a lime. Save the oaky, brooding reds for a steak in January.
3. Modest Alcohol: You're either adding more booze in a cocktail, or you're melting ice into it over an afternoon. Either way, start moderate. A 14.5% monster is not your friend in the sun.
4. Soft Tannins (For Reds): You want supple and juicy, not grippy and structured. Here's why: tannins turn bitter when they get cold and when they sit over ice. That grippy young red that's all puckery on the edges? It'll taste like aspirin in a sangria. The juicy, low-tannin red that you could practically drink chilled? That one's perfect.
5. Price: This is a 12 to 18 dollar bottle job. This is not a night for a 60 dollar bottle. Part of the joy here is that the wine is humble. Spending more doesn't make a better sangria; frequently, it makes a worse one, because the thing you pay extra for—the oak, the structure, and the age-worthiness—are exactly the things you don't want in the pitcher.

The Modern Kosher Wine Explosion & The Mevushal Advantage

[07:52]

Now, this is The Kosher Terroir, so let me put a fine point on what this means for our table, and then we'll go taste.

Two things:

• Item One: It has generally never been easier to do this kosher and do it well. The wave of fresh, high-acid kosher rosés and crisp, unoaked whites in the last decade—Israeli, French, Italian—is exactly, precisely the kind of wine this whole episode is built on. The category grew up right in our hands.
• Item Two (A Practical One): Mevushal wines. For the uninitiated, Mevushal is wine that's been flash-heated, gently pasteurized, so that it keeps its kosher status even when it's handed or poured out by anyone at the table. So at a serious tasting, that's a trade-off people argue about. But in a summer party where fifteen different hands are reaching into the same pitcher, where your cousin is topping up his own glass, Mevushal is honestly a feature. It's stable, it's forgiving, it pours and it travels, and it doesn't fuss. For what we're doing today, it's a gift.

So here's where we're headed: First, I'm going to pour four wines and taste them with you, but not the way you've been taught. We're going to judge them as bases. Not "is this a lovely wine to sip?" but "what could I build out of this?" It's a completely different lens, and once you've got it, you can't unsee it. Every wine, every drink, every ratio—it's all in the show notes. So don't scramble for a pen, just pour and come taste with me.

Tasting Session: Retraining Your Palate

[10:07]

All right. I have four wines in front of me, four glasses. And before I pour the first one, I need to retrain your palate for the next fifteen minutes because we are going to taste these wrong on purpose.

Here's what I mean: When you and I normally taste a wine, we're asking, is it complete? Is it balanced? Is it elegant? Does it have something to say all on its own? That's the sanctuary question. Today we're asking a different one. Today the question is: what could I build out of you? We're not auditioning soloists; we're auditioning the foundation of a house. And a great foundation on its own is kind of boring to look at. That's the point.

Let me tell you why I trust acid so much, and then we'll pour. Years ago, at one of the first harvests I attended of a mentor—a mentor with old hands, forty vintages, the kind of man who tasted grapes off the vine and could tell you the pick date within three days. Everybody in my past seemed obsessed with sugar. I took a refractometer in hand, and I was measuring sugar, chasing ripeness, chasing that big, lush fruit.

And he watched me do this. He took a berry, handed it to me, and said, "Stop tasting for the sweet, taste for the spine." And he had me chew the grape to find the tartness—that little zing on the sides of your tongue. And he said, "That's the part that survives. Sugar fades, fruit fades, but acid is the skeleton everything else hangs on. A wine with no acid is a body with no bones. It slumps."

I never forgot it, and it turns out it's the single most important sentence in the world of summer drinks, too, because everything we do today—every spoon of sugar, every orange wheel, every splash of soda—is weight. We're hanging on the wine. And if there's no skeleton, the whole thing slumps. So when I tell you to buy for acid, it's a famous old winemaker talking through me. Let's pour.

Wine 1: The Pale Rosé (The Summer MVP)

This is a pale one. Look at the color—that whisper of pink, almost onion skin. Provence built its entire global reputation on this exact shade, and there's a reason: pale, dry, mineral rosé.

Now I'm going to nose it: strawberries, white peaches, a little citrus pith, maybe a wet stone thing underneath. And on the palate... there it is, that's the zing. That's the spine my mentor was talking about. It's almost too tart to be cozy on its own, which means this is the perfect base, and that little excess of acid is exactly why. This is your MVP. You can spritz it, you can build white peach sangria on it, or you can freeze it into a frosé later in the show. If you buy one bottle off this episode, buy a bright, dry rosé.

And the great news for our table, the kosher rosé category has absolutely exploded in the last ten years: Israel, southern France, Italy. Pale, dry, high acid, modestly priced—the shelf is full of exactly what we need. That was not true fifteen years ago, though.

• Heresy Count Check: Still zero true heresies. We're just tasting. The crimes truly start in part three; be patient.

Wine 2: The Crisp, Unoaked White

Think Sauvignon Blanc, an Israeli white blend, or a zippy Italian white. Let's nose it first. This one seems louder: grapefruit, cut grass, green herbs, a little jalapeño and lime if it's a real Sauvignon Blanc. No oak anywhere; nobody put this in a barrel, and good.

The taste is clean, lean, racy, finishes clean, and has a little bitter edge in a way that makes you want another sip.

• The Verdict: This is the backbone of a white sangria. It's got the acid, and crucially, it's got this green herbal register that loves cucumbers, loves basil, and loves thyme—loves stone fruit. Where the rosé is all soft red fruit, this one is crisp and gardeny. Keep both in your repertoire; they build different drinks.

Quick story about this one: In Veneto, Northern Italy, home of the Spritz, many years ago, the thing that floored me wasn't a famous restaurant. It was the random little bars at six PM, packed with every single person standing with the same orange drink. They weren't sipping a fine wine in reverent silence; they were talking loudly with their hands, with a cheap fizzy wine in a cocktail. It reframed wine for me entirely. To them, this wasn't lowering the wine; this was the wine doing its actual job—gathering people at the end of a workday. That bar did more for my philosophy than any cellar tour. We'll build that exact drink soon.

Wine 3: A Young, Juicy Red (Low Tannins)

This is the one people get wrong. Here's where buyers stumble, so listen close. When most people hear red wine for sangria, they reach for something big and structured because it feels generous. Wrong instinct.

Nose this: I want bright red fruit—cherry, raspberry, a little spice—not a wall of oak and black fruit and tannin. And on the palate, the test is the finish: does it grip your gums and dry your mouth out? If it does, put it back. We want juicy. We want the kind of red you could—and here comes heresy number two—chill in the fridge for about fifteen minutes and drink cold.

• Heresy Count: Our heresy count is now at two. Chilling red wine. You're not wrong to try it; there's a whole category of light reds in France and Italy served cold on purpose. Fifteen minutes in the fridge—try it this week and write to me.

Why does a juicy, low-tannin red matter so much for sangria? Because of the cold and the ice. Tannin, that grippy, drying compound, turns bitter and harsh when it's cold and when it sits over melting ice for an hour. So the big, structured reds that are lovely warm in the winter become genuinely unpleasant in the cold pitcher. The cheerful, juicy red—the one with no hard edges—that one gets better cold.

• The Verdict: This is your classic red sangria base, and it's the wine going into the cola drink that I promised you in the beginning. Yes, we're really doing that.

Wine 4: The Sparkler

Think a kosher Prosecco-style or a traditional method bubbly. Listen to that fizz. The nose has green apples, a little brioche if it's a fancier kind, and citrus. The taste is crisp, frothy, and refreshing.

Now, this one comes with the single most important technique note in the whole episode, so let me say it slowly: You never put bubbles in the pitcher. Never. If you stir sparkling wine into a batch of sangria the night before, by the time you serve it tomorrow, it's flat, sad sugar water. The bubbles are delicate; they're the first thing to die.

• The Verdict: Sparkling wine is not a base; it's the finish. It's the splash you add to each individual glass at the very last second, so every single pour gets that lift and that fizz and life. Build your base ahead, crown it with bubbles at the last minute. That's one rule that separates a host who knows from one who doesn't know what he's doing.

The Four Core Levers

[19:30]

So look what we've got: a soft red fruit rosé, a green herbal white, a juicy low tannin red, and a sparkler that stays out of the pitcher until the last moment. Four totally different builds. But did you catch the thread running through all four?

Acidity. Every single one I praised for the same reason—that zing, that spine, that tartness that's almost too much on its own. That's not a coincidence; that's the whole secret of the episode hiding in plain sight.

If you remember nothing else from this tasting, remember the counterintuitive rule: The wine that's a little too tart to love on its own is usually the one that's about to make something magnificent. Buy the lean one, buy the zippy one, buy the one your snob friends called too acidic. Then bring it to me in the next chapter, because now we start building, and the heresies get real.

Five Summer Cocktail Builds

[22:11]

Okay, glasses are clean, the wines are open, and I've been promising you crimes since the first thirty seconds of the show. It's time to pay up, but before I pour a single thing, I want to give you the one idea that makes all this make sense. Because if you listen up, you'll never need a recipe again:

A cocktail is just blending by another name.

That's it. When a winemaker is in the cellar deciding how much of this barrel to add to that tank, they're blending four things: acid, sugar, alcohol, and aroma. When you're standing at your counter building a drink, you're balancing the exact same four things—same instinct, different glass. So you already know how to do this; you've been tasting your whole life. Let's build.

Build 1: The Honest Spritz

We start where the Veneto starts: the spritz. I'm going to give you the classic, and then I'm going to give you the winemaker's version. The classic is a rhythm you can remember easily: 3, 2, 1. Three parts sparkling wine, two parts bitter aperitif, and one part soda. Big glass, lots of ice, and a fat slice of orange. Listen to it—it sounds just like summer.

Now, why does this work mechanically? Two reasons, and they're both winemaking reasons:

1. The Bitterness: In heat, your palate gets tired, and sweet things start to get unpleasantly excessive fast. The term used is cloying. Bitterness scrubs the palate clean and makes you thirsty for the next sip. It's the same reason an Italian reaches for something bitter before dinner.
2. The Bubbles: Carbonation physically lifts aromatic compounds up out of the glass and into your nose. Bubbles aren't decorative; they're a delivery system. They make the whole drink smell louder.

Now here's my vision for this audience: The standard aperitif can bury the wine. Sometimes you taste everything but the wine. So I cut the bitter component back, and I add fresh citrus and a longer pour of a really characterful sparkling base. So the wine leads, and the bitterness just frames it. Same skeleton, but now you can actually taste the terroir we care so much about. It's honest because the wine's still in charge.

• Heresy Count: None here. A spritz is the most respectable thing you'll do all summer.

Build 2: White Peach and Thyme Sangria

This is the one that teaches you the most, so I want to slow down. We're building on the crisp herbal white from the tasting. Into the pitcher go ripe white peaches in wedges, a few sprigs of fresh thyme, a little sugar, a squeeze of lemon, and the wine. Then comes the most important instruction in the entire recipe: You put it in the fridge and you walk away overnight.

Here's why, and this is real chemistry: When fruit sits in wine, a slow exchange happens. It's called maceration—the same word we use in the cellar when grape skins sit on juice. The sugar, the acids, and the aromatic oils in the peach slowly migrate into the wine, and the wine migrates into the fruit. Given a few hours, they stop being wine with fruit floating in it and become one integrated thing—a single drink that tastes composed of the assembled components. If you make sangria and serve it twenty minutes later, you've got juice with a garnish. If you make it the night before, you've got sangria. Time is the ingredient you can't buy and can't rush.

And why add an herb? Because it adds aromatic lift and complexity without adding sweetness. That's a pro move. Everybody reaches for more sugar and more fruit when a drink tastes flat, and they make it heavier. Herbs give you intrigue and perfume with zero extra weight. Thyme, basil, rosemary, or a few crushed mint leaves—these are your secret weapons: restraint, not more stuff.

• The Rule: Build the base the night before. Add the bubbles and the ice only when you pour. "Make ahead" is not laziness; it's the actual technique. The host who relaxes at their own party is the host who did the work last night.

Build 3: The Kalimotxo

[28:28]

Here it is, where the opening promise is paid back in full. Pour the juicy young red, and pour an equal measure of cold cola right on top. Ice, a wedge of lemon, and stir. That, my friends, is the sound of heresy number three, and it's delicious.

• Heresy Count: Three. Cola in wine. The snob in the room has left the building—good riddance, more for us.

Let me defend this because it is genuinely, technically defensible, and that's the fun of it. This drink is called Kalimotxo, and it is not some sad student desperation move. It's a beloved Basque institution. The story goes it was born at a festival in the Basque Country in the 1970s. A crew running a drink stand discovered their bulk red wine had turned, gone a bit off, and rather than dump it, they cut it with cola to rescue it, gave it this jokey name, and it became a phenomenon. Today it's poured at festivals all across Spain; it has a heritage.

But here's the winemaker's defense—the real one: Think about what cola actually is. It's acid, its sugar, and it has a spice and vanilla aromatic profile. Cola is basically vanilla, citrus, and warm baking spice. Now think about what we add to expensive red wine to make it richer and rounder: oak barrels, which give us vanilla, baking spice, and a softening of the edges.

Do you see it? Cola does to a thin, cheap, young red almost exactly what an oak barrel does to a serious one. It adds the vanilla, it adds the spice, it rounds the sharp edges, and it fills in the hollow middle. It completes a wine that was never going to be complete on its own. It's not vandalism; it's a five-second barrel aging program in a glass. Taste it before you judge it—every single time, the skeptics go silent.

Build 4: Frozen Rosé (Frosé)

Now we get fancy and we get a little nerdy, because this one is pure technique. You'd think frozen rosé is obvious: wine, ice, blender, done. It's not, and if you do it that way, you'll make pink water. Two things you need to understand:

1. Don't add ice; freeze the wine itself. Ice in a blender just dilutes—it melts and waters down everything you've worked for. So instead, you pour the rosé into a tray and freeze it into a slush ahead of time. When you blend, you're blending concentrated wine, not wine plus water. More flavor, not less.
2. The Freezing Point: Pure wine won't freeze into a nice, scoopable slush because the alcohol lowers the freezing point, and you get a rock-hard, useless block or a sloppy mess. So you stir in a spoonful of sugar first. Sugar interacts with the freezing point and changes the texture, so instead of a brick, you get that perfect soft, scoopable sorbet consistency. That's not a garnish trick; that's food science doing you a favor.

• Heresy Count: We're now up to heresy number four. We have now frozen wine solid on purpose. Somewhere, a sommelier just felt a chill and doesn't know why.

And one more thing: because cold mutes aroma—which is why frozen food needs more seasoning than hot food—when you freeze rosé, all that delicate strawberry perfume goes quiet. The fix? You over-aromatize on purpose. You blend in extra fresh strawberries and a good squeeze of lemon—more than seems reasonable—precisely because the cold is going to swallow half of it. You build it loud so that it lands right. That's the kind of thinking that separates real frosé from pink slush. It's theater, it's gorgeous in the glass, and it's a showstopper at any summer party.

Build 5: The Wine Highball

Let me leave you with one more quieter one, because not every drink should knock you over, and this is where the smart money is heading. A tall glass, lots of ice, a measure of crisp white or rosé, topped with soda water, and a long, long ribbon of citrus peel (lemon or grapefruit) squeezed or expressed over the top so the oils spray across the surface.

That's it. It's barely a recipe; it's wine lengthened.

• Heresy Count: Heresy count number five: ice directly in wine on purpose. We've made peace with it by now.

Why does this one matter? Because it's low and slow. Half the alcohol, twice the refreshment, and you can have two or three across an afternoon and still be standing, still be charming, and still know everyone's name at five o'clock. The whole world right now is moving towards lighter, lower alcohol, more sessionable drinking—the "I want to enjoy this all day, not survive it" crowd. And the wine highball is the most elegant answer to it there is. Don't underestimate the quiet drink; sometimes it's the most sophisticated thing on the table.

The Summer Calendar: Reading the Room

[36:23]

Let's talk about your summer. So now we have five drinks in our pocket. But here's the thing I believe deeply, and it's true of wine at a dinner table or a spritz on the lawn: the right drink at the wrong moment is just a missed opportunity. A frozen rosé is magic at two in the afternoon in July. That same frozen rosé handed to someone on a cool evening in September just makes them cold and a little confused.

Matching the drinks to the moment is its own small art, and it's the difference between a host who has good drinks and a host who reads the room. So let's walk the summer calendar together, front to back, and I'll hand you the right glass for each moment, and the one-line reason why:

Yom Haatzmaut / Memorial Day Weekend

We start at the gate. The unofficial first day of summer—the day the porch furniture comes back out and everybody mentally clocks out of winter. The move here is restraint. This is not the moment for your showstopper; this is the moment to set a tone, and the tone is: we're casual now, the season has turned. So you pour an honest spritz. It's bright, it's low stakes, it's celebratory without being a production. It says summer's here without you having to announce it. Think of it as the opening note of a long piece of music—you don't open with a crescendo, you open with something that makes everyone lean back in their chair. Save your fireworks; they're literally coming later.

The Fourth of July

Here come the fireworks—the biggest, most crowded, most chaotic backyard event of the summer. A lot of people, a lot of heat, a lot of hours, and the headline here isn't a recipe. The headline is one word: batching.

Let me tell you the difference between a good host and a frazzled one, because I've been both. The frazzled host is the one stuck behind the cooler the entire party, building drinks one at a time, missing the whole event while the line forms and the burgers burn. The good host did the work last night and is out on the lawn with a drink in their hand. Batching is how you become the second person.

So for the Fourth, you make a double batch of red sangria the night before. That juicy, low-tannin red, the fruit, the maceration time we talked about—all of it done and resting in the fridge before a single guest arrives. It scales beautifully, it actually improves sitting overnight, and it frees you completely.

Let me give you the one piece of math that makes you look like a professional: One standard bottle of wine is about five glasses, but once you add fruit and ice and a splash of something on top, call it closer to six or seven servings per bottle in sangria. So for a party of fifteen who will have two or three each, you're looking at six or seven bottles of base wine. Do the math once the night before, and you never run out. You never panic-buy warm wine from a gas station at four PM again.

• Visual Tip: If you want a patriotic visual, a red sangria, a white sangria, and a frosé lined up gives you red, white, and pink on the table without a drop of food coloring. Let the wine do the decorating.

Labor Day / Rosh Chodesh Elul

The send-off. The evenings have a little edge to them now, the light's going gold earlier, and everybody feels the season closing, whether they say it or not. This is the frosé curtain call—the last truly hot afternoon drink of the year. So send the summer off in style with a showpiece.

But—and here's where reading the room matters—as the sun goes down and it actually cools off, this is the moment to pivot. Retire the frozen drink and bring out the slightly richer sangria. Start nudging towards stone fruit: plums, late peaches, even a few blackberries, and a base with a touch more body. You're building a bridge; you're walking your guests gently from summer to fall in a glass. That's a beautiful thing to be able to do, and almost nobody thinks to do it.

Rapid Fire: The Small Moments

Most of summer is the small stuff—the random Tuesdays, the spontaneous gatherings. So let me go fast, rapid-fire, one drink and one reason each, so you're never caught flat-footed:

• A Weeknight Cookout (No Notice): Kalimotxo (Red and Cola). Zero fuss, no overnight prep, no special shopping, and it turns "I have nothing to serve" into the most fun drink of the week.
• The Beach Day or Park Picnic: Pre-batch a white or rosé sangria into a thermos or a sealed jug, and crucially, no bubbles. Because there is nothing to go flat and nothing to explode in your bag, it's the make-ahead drink that travels. Pour it cold out of the thermos, and you're the hero on a blanket.
• A Garden Party or Bridal Shower: Frosé and a delicate White Peach Sangria. These are the photogenic drinks. They look like the event feels; the drink is part of the decor.
• A Long Afternoon of Watching a Game: The Wine Highball. Light, crisp, and incredibly low ABV. It gives you something refreshing to sip on for hours without wiping you out before halftime.
• A Late-Night Backyard Firepit: A bold, slightly smoky Chilled Red. Think a youthful Syrah or a Pinot Noir with a bit of earthiness, served with a slight chill. It bridges the gap between the cool night air and the warmth of the fire perfectly.

The Golden Rules of Summer Wine

To wrap it all up and ensure every bottle you open this season hits the mark, keep these three golden rules in mind:

1. When in Doubt, Chill it Down: Temperature is your volume knob. If a wine feels too flabby, heavy, or hot in the summer heat, drop it in an ice bucket for 15 minutes. It tightens the structure and brings the fruit back to life.
2. Read the Room (and the Weather): Match the weight of the wine to the humidity of the day. Heavy oaks and massive tannins fight against the heat; crisp acids and bright fruits dance with it.
3. Prep the Batch, Save the Stress: For any gathering larger than four people, lean into the pre-batched carafes and thermoses. Your job as a host is to enjoy the sun, not to be trapped behind a counter playing bartender all afternoon.

Bring on the heat—your glasses are ready.