The Kosher Terroir - What Makes a Wine Iconic
00:08
Welcome to The Kosher Terroir.
00:11
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.
00:25
If you're driving in your car, please focus on the road ahead.
00:29
If you're relaxing at home, please pour yourself a glass of wonderful kosher wine.
00:35
Sit back, relax, and enjoy.
00:39
I want to ask you a question tonight, and I want you to actually answer it before I do.
00:48
What makes a wine iconic?
00:52
Not good.
00:53
Plenty of wines are good.
00:56
Not memorable even.
00:58
A rainy Tuesday can make a wine memorable, iconic, the bottle that gets promoted out of your cellar and into your biography.
01:11
The bottle you're still describing to someone 30 years from now, with your hands moving.
01:22
So?
01:24
Is it a score?
01:26
90-something points from a famous critic?
01:30
Is it a price?
01:32
A price that makes your children raise their eyebrows at you?
01:37
Is it the label, the name everybody photographs before anybody pours?
01:45
Here's what a lifetime of tables has taught me.
01:50
Every one of those things is evidence of something.
01:55
And not one of them is the thing itself.
02:00
This week I was scrolling
02:04
The way we all scroll, half looking, half elsewhere, and a post from Joseph Herzog stopped my thumb cold.
02:15
The post was built around a Facebook message Joseph Herzog had received from Chef Mike at Mike's Bistro in Manhattan.
02:28
If you've eaten there, you already know.
02:32
Chef Mike had opened a bottle of Herzog Chalk Hill Cabernet Sauvignon
02:39
from 1994 and sent Joseph the kind of message you only send when a wine has truly stunned you.
02:48
More than 30 years on, this wine is still drinking amazingly.
02:54
Joseph's own reaction in the post, still alive and kicking.
03:00
Do the arithmetic with me.
03:03
That bottle is more than 30 years old.
03:07
There are listeners of the show that are younger than that wine.
03:13
But that's not the detail that got me, because that came in the second note from the chef.
03:20
He's running low.
03:22
He had just sold his last three bottles, that very week.
03:27
Joseph wrote back, and I'm quoting, Chef Mike, I feel your pain
03:34
A man who feeds people for a living, down to his final bottles, counting them, like the last chapters of a book, he can't bear to finish
03:45
And Joseph heard exactly what I heard.
03:49
This post drew the lesson in one line, and I'll quote it rather than pretend I said it better.
03:59
Buy wine for drinking and buy wine for aging.
04:04
Put bottles away on purpose.
04:08
For those special moments, years, even decades down the road.
04:14
Because when you finally pull that cork, you taste
04:20
His words again, not only the wine, but the time and memories that came with it
04:28
The years it waited, the person who put it away, everything that happened to you between the buying and the opening.
04:38
And then Joseph reached for the exact line I would have reached for.
04:43
The watch line: Patek Philippe's famous promise.
04:48
You never actually own one.
04:51
You merely look after it for the next generation.
04:54
Maybe Joseph wrote, great wine deserves a version of that too.
05:02
Joseph, it does.
05:04
And tonight, I want to go one step past the watchmakers.
05:09
Because there's a difference between the watch and the bottle.
05:13
And the difference is why wine is the braver possession.
05:20
You keep a watch by keeping it.
05:22
You keep a wine by choosing one day exactly who will be at the table when you open it.
05:30
A great old bottle does more than preserve wine.
05:34
It preserves time.
05:38
Welcome back to the Kosher Terroir.
05:41
I'm Simon Jacob and tonight is a different kind of episode.
05:45
No bottle and foil this time.
05:47
No scorecards, no grid, no verdict.
05:51
Regulars will remember we've spent a whole evening on those, learning every framework the wine world has ever built for judging a glass.
06:02
And I told you then, honestly, that the frameworks work for what they measure.
06:09
Tonight is the third leg of that stool.
06:12
Tonight is about everything the number can't hold.
06:17
Because tonight I'm doing something I've never really done on the show before.
06:23
I'm opening my own cellar and my family's, and I'm telling you the stories of the bottles
06:32
That became iconic to me.
06:35
Not the ones the magazines canonize.
06:39
The ones that survived, surprised me.
06:43
connected generations, and worked their way into my own story.
06:48
The question in the open deserves better than a definition.
06:55
It deserves evidence.
06:58
Six chapters tonight.
07:00
And fair warning.
07:01
There's no clock.
07:03
I'm not rushing this one.
07:05
And I'd suggest you don't either.
07:08
Pour something honest.
07:09
Find a good chair.
07:12
Some evenings you don't rush.
07:14
And this is one of them.
07:17
Here's where I'm going.
07:20
A wooden case that went through a flood and smelled like it.
07:25
And a winemaker who had every reason to beg me not to open what was inside.
07:32
An old argument between a number and a memory
07:37
Featuring the most famous palate on earth.
07:41
A family of wines that routinely outlives the people who buy them.
07:47
And the Jewish table, where wine has been keeping time for 2,000 years.
07:55
A backroom in a Manhattan restaurant
07:59
That was kosher for only one night.
08:02
Just me, a vice president of Royal Wine, and a bottle my father bought before some of you were even born.
08:12
A Sancerre that hadn't read the manual, and a wine that, in the same year, received one of the harshest scores ever handed
08:23
to a serious Israeli red, and a trophy as the best wine in Israel.
08:29
Both juries tasted the same bottle.
08:32
One of them missed something
08:35
Deciding which one?
08:37
Well, that's chapter six.
08:39
And at the very end, a small bottle in a bedside drawer
08:45
The one that was never opened at all.
08:47
I'll explain when we get there.
08:50
But before chapter one, do something for me.
08:55
Think of the single greatest bottle in your life.
08:58
Not the most expensive.
09:00
The greatest.
09:01
Hold it in your mind.
09:04
Picture where you were.
09:06
Now answer me this
09:08
Just to yourself.
09:10
When you remember that bottle, do you remember the wine first or the people?
09:17
Keep your answer.
09:18
We're going to come back to it tonight.
09:21
More than once.
09:23
Every story tonight starts somewhere unlikely.
09:28
Mine starts with water.
09:30
In the one place water should never, ever be.
09:35
In a case of wine.
09:38
I'm holding a piece of paper, an invitation.
09:43
I kept it, of course I kept it.
09:46
Dated for a Tuesday night in the spring of 2016.
09:51
May 31st, the Tuesday after Memorial Day.
09:56
And I want to read to you what it promised.
09:59
Because I wrote
10:01
These words myself, and I had no idea how true they were about to become.
10:08
A wine and food pairing dinner, ten plus courses.
10:13
And wines—I'm quoting now—'wines that are no longer attainable for any price; wines that would be available to our friends at personal Kiddushes or in our homes.'
10:28
An evening, the invitation says, that I am not sure could ever be recreated.
10:36
The evening was a benefit, a fundraiser for Nachum Segal's Foundation for Jewish Broadcasting and its mission of Achdut Yisrael.
10:46
Jewish unity.
10:48
If you know the foundation's work, you know what that meant in practice back then.
10:53
A Torah dedication
10:55
to the Ethiopian community in Sderot.
10:58
Support for a Jewish community in Houston, Texas, that had been flooded out of its homes.
11:04
a Hanukkah Unity concert in the weeks after the terror attack in Paris.
11:11
Jews showing up for Jews, wherever they were.
11:16
A thousand dollars a plate, and every dollar of it—the food, the wine, all of it—was sponsored or donated.
11:29
The dinner was at NoBo in Teaneck.
11:40
It wasn't a wine list at all.
11:42
It was three cellars opened, bottles from the Herzog family's personal collections.
11:49
Bottles from Jay Buchsbaum's cellar, and bottles from mine.
11:50

11:54
Which brings me to the case in my cellar set aside for exactly this kind of night
12:02
was a wooden case of 1992, Herzog Chalk Hill Special Edition.
12:09
And if you were with us at the opening, you already know that family's wine.
12:14
The same Chalk Hill line, Chef Mike is rationing right now, 30 years on.
12:21
In 2016, my case was 24 years old, and it had a problem.
12:28
Years earlier, water had found its way into the basement cellar of my parents' home in West Orange.
12:36
The cellar where that case slept.
12:39
The same basement I'll mention now that my father had spent filling with the bottles you'll hear about later tonight.
12:49
A flood in the one room of the house that exists to keep things safe.
12:57
The wine survived.
12:59
The bottles were intact
13:01
The levels looked right.
13:03
But the case, the case remembered.
13:06
Wet wood doesn't forget
13:09
You'd lift the lid and it would breathe at you.
13:13
Damp, musty, that low cellar basement note that makes every wine person in the room go very quiet.
13:24
Because here's the thing about that smell.
13:27
It's almost exactly the smell we're all trained to fear.
13:33
cork taint.
13:34
A corked bottle announces itself the very same way.
13:39
Wet cardboard, moldy newspaper, a cellar gone wrong
13:44
The chemistry lives in damp wood and cork.
13:49
So when the wooden case has actually been wet,
13:53
And actually smells like that, the case itself is telling you a story with a terrible ending.
14:02
Whether it's telling the truth, you can only find out one way.
14:08
Alicia Wilber was there that night from Herzog, from the winemaking side.
14:15
And she was worried.
14:17
She had every right to be, and every reason.
14:21
Think about what I was proposing to pour, the winery's flagship
14:27
a wine from a case that smelled of flood water, into the glasses of a room that had paid a thousand dollars a seat for charity
14:38
And in the winery's honor, with the Herzog family's own bottles on the same table.
14:45
If that wine came up corked, or worse, flat, dead, broken.
14:51
It wouldn't fail quietly.
14:53
It would fail in front of everyone.
14:56
There was every reason in the world to leave it closed.
15:00
There were other bottles.
15:02
There were safer bottles
15:04
And I asked her to open it anyway.
15:08
I want you to stand where we stood for a second.
15:12
The cork comes out, and the cork tells you nothing.
15:16
Corks love to keep secrets.
15:18
the first splash into the glass, the lean-in, the half-second, where your nose knows before the rest of you do.
15:29
Luscious, velvety, rich, deep, sweet, mature fruit
15:38
a twenty-four-year-old cabernet with its shoulders back, not a survivor on life support, a wine in full voice, at the height of its power
15:51
as if it had been waiting in that miserable wet box for exactly this room on exactly this night
16:00
The case had been through a flood.
16:02
The wine had been through a flood.
16:04
And the wine simply didn't mention it.
16:09
And I'll say this quiet part out loud, gently though, because after that night, it was hard to miss.
16:17
We poured a flood survivor
16:20
at a dinner raising money for a flooded-out Jewish community in Houston.
16:26
I'm not going to make more of that than it deserves, but having been there, glass in hand,
16:34
It's hard not to feel that that evening had a theme that hadn't been printed on the invitation.
16:44
Now what did that bottle actually teach me?
16:48
Because this is chapter one, and I'm laying foundations for tonight.
16:53
First, old wine is not automatically good wine.
16:58
Please hear that.
16:59
Age ruins far more bottles than it blesses.
17:04
And that is exactly why opening a mature bottle is dramatic.
17:10
Why your heart rate changes when the cork squeals.
17:14
If age guaranteed greatness, there'd be no suspense, and the suspense is part of the magic.
17:22
Every old cork is an envelope with a verdict inside.
17:28
Second, the outside of a thing does not testify to the inside.
17:34
A worrying exterior, a stained label, a shabby capsule, a case that smells like a drowned attic.
17:44
tells you what happened around the wine.
17:48
It cannot tell you what happened in it.
17:52
The only witness to that is the wine itself, and it only testifies once
17:59
And third, and this is the one I want you to carry the rest of this evening.
18:07
What made the bottle unforgettable had nothing to do with anyone's rating.
18:14
It was the age.
18:17
The surprise.
18:19
The room.
18:21
Alicia's worry and her relief.
18:24
Which I promise you was bigger than mine.
18:28
Nachum's cause humming under the whole evening.
18:32
The people leaning in, somewhere out there, that 1992 almost certainly carried a score once.
18:41
From somebody.
18:43
Nobody at the table could tell you what it was.
18:47
And nobody ever will.
18:50
One more thing about that night, because time doesn't stand still for people either.
18:56
That worried winemaker standing next to me at the table.
19:01
Last year, Herzog promoted her.
19:04
Alicia Wilber is now their production winemaker.
19:08
The bottles age, so do the careers.
19:12
Everything in the story kept becoming more of itself.
19:18
So here's the first draft of tonight's answer.
19:22
An iconic wine is not just a famous wine.
19:26
It's a wine that carries a story forward.
19:29
and still has something to say when it's opened.
19:33
But wait, I hear it.
19:36
Some of you are already arguing with me
19:38
And it's a fair argument.
19:41
Simon, aren't scores how we're supposed to know a wine is great?
19:47
Isn't that the whole system?
19:50
It's a fair enough argument.
19:53
The number people are not fools, and I'm not going to pretend they are.
19:58
So let's have that argument properly.
20:01
And I'm going to argue the other side first, properly with respect, because the case for the number
20:09
Is real, and if I pretend it isn't, you shouldn't trust anything else I say tonight.
20:16
Here's the case for the number.
20:20
You're standing in a wine shop, 400 bottles on the wall.
20:25
You have one dinner, one budget, and no time to make 400 mistakes
20:32
And on a little shelf tag, somebody who has tasted more wine than you ever will has left you a message.
20:41
This one impressed me.
20:44
That message is a gift.
20:46
It's the accumulated palate of a professional compressed into just digits,
20:55
handed to you free of charge.
20:59
Scores rescue beginners from bad bottles.
21:02
They reward winemakers who do honest work in unfashionable places.
21:08
They give all of us a common language for a thing that is famously hard to put into words.
21:18
And I'll go further, closer to home.
21:21
Scores did the kosher world a genuine favor.
21:26
For a long time, kosher wine would be waved away with a smirk.
21:31
You know that smirk.
21:34
But numbers don't smirk.
21:36
And when kosher bottles started earning the same numbers as everybody else's bottles on the same tables,
21:44
From the same critics, a certain kind of condescension got very hard to maintain.
21:52
The number walked kosher wine into rooms that the label alone was never getting into.
21:59
And it hasn't stopped walking.
22:01
In our own decade, a winery that makes only kosher wine, Covenant in California, saw one of its wines crowned with the perfect score.
22:12
One hundred points for a wine you could pour at any Kiddush on earth.
22:18
Whatever else you think of a number, by the end of tonight
22:25
That one mattered.
22:28
Regulars know we once spent an entire evening on this.
22:33
Learning every framework the wine trade has ever built for judging a glass, all the way up to the 20-point score from a university laboratory.
22:46
And what I told you that night, I'll repeat now, because I meant it.
22:51
The frameworks work.
22:53
The grid works for what it measures.
22:58
But for what it measures, that's the whole chapter right there.
23:04
So what does it measure?
23:06
A score is one professional, one afternoon, one glass, often one glass, out of dozens on the same table.
23:17
Tasted against its neighbors, spat into a bucket, described in ninety seconds
23:25
That's not a scandal.
23:27
That's the job done honestly.
23:31
But understand what you're holding when you hold that number.
23:36
It is a snapshot, a photograph of a river, a photograph that can be sharp, well-framed, completely accurate
23:47
And the river has already moved on because the wine changes bottle to bottle, year to year
23:57
The wine you opened tonight is not the wine the critics meant.
24:02
And here's the part almost nobody says out loud.
24:07
The taster changes too.
24:09
A winemaker I know.
24:11
You'll meet him properly before the night's out.
24:14
Once put it to me this way drink the same wine three nights in a row
24:20
And it will not taste the same to you three nights in a row.
24:24
Not necessarily because the bottles differ.
24:27
Because you do.
24:29
Your palate is a moving instrument.
24:32
If that's true of the same person across three nights, what exactly is one stranger's afternoon supposed to tell you about your table, your company, and your night?
24:46
That same winemaker told me a story, I think about constantly.
24:52
Early in his career, at a winery in the Napa Valley
24:58
I'll leave its name out as he did.
25:01
He inherited a Sauvignon Blanc vineyard that simply couldn't give him the flavors he wanted.
25:09
high yields, low profile.
25:12
So he worked the problem like the trained professional he is.
25:19
Picked the fruit overripe on purpose, then corrected the wine in the cellar step by step.
25:26
A heavily worked wine
25:29
A rescued wine, legal, skillful, and about as far from the vineyard speaks as winemaking gets.
25:38
That wine went out into the world and came back with the best score that winery had ever received for the category, from Robert Parker, the most famous palate on earth.
25:52
And the review said, in effect, finally, they're doing something right.
25:58
Now, was Parker wrong?
26:00
No.
26:02
That's what makes the story great.
26:04
The number was honest.
26:06
What was in the glass was genuinely delicious.
26:10
And he said so.
26:11
But the number had no idea what it was measuring.
26:16
It couldn't see the vineyard that failed, the harvest gamble, the cellar rescue.
26:23
It graded the destination and knew nothing, nothing about the journey.
26:29
And people, that cuts both ways.
26:33
If a number can't see the story that saves a wine, it also can't see the story that sanctifies one.
26:40
It can't see that the bottle was the last one your father bought
26:46
It can't see who was at the table, or why that night mattered, or what was said over the second glass.
26:56
It's not that the number lies.
26:59
It's that the number is blind, blind to everything that turns a wine into a memory.
27:08
A score can tell you whether a wine impressed a critic.
27:13
It cannot tell you who you were with.
27:17
what the wine meant, or whether you will remember it in thirty years.
27:25
Think back to chapter one for a second.
27:27
That 1992 Chalk Hill
27:31
in its miserable wet case.
27:34
Somewhere.
27:35
Once, that wine almost certainly carried a score.
27:40
some magazine, some newspaper, some tag on the shelf in 1995.
27:47
I stood in that room.
27:50
I poured that wine.
27:52
I watched the faces.
27:54
And I'm telling you, nobody at that table could tell you the number.
28:00
Nobody ever will.
28:03
The number evaporated.
28:05
The night didn't.
28:08
So here's your homework, and it's the same question from the top of the night, wearing different clothes.
28:16
Call up the one bottle you remember most clearly, your clearest wine memory.
28:23
The one you can still almost taste.
28:27
Now, do you remember its score?
28:31
Do you even know if it had one?
28:34
And before we move on, I'm going to plant something.
28:39
Later tonight I'm going to tell you about a wine, an Israeli wine, that in one and the same year received one of the harshest scores.
28:50
A serious Israeli wine had ever gotten from a major American magazine.
28:56
And a trophy from a jury in Bordeaux as the best wine in the entire country.
29:04
Same wine, same harvest.
29:08
Both juries tasted honestly.
29:11
One of them missed something.
29:14
Hold that thought until chapter 6.
29:17
But first, an honest question deserves an honest next step.
29:22
If the number doesn't make a wine iconic, what does age actually do?
29:30
Why does a bottle spend 30 years becoming magnificent?
29:34
While its neighbor on the same shelf just becomes old.
29:40
One answer involves chemistry, gravel, a noble fungus with terrible table manners
29:47
and a family of wines that has been outliving the people who bought them for 300 years.
29:55
Let's start with a fungus, because it's the best story in wine that nobody tells at dinner.
30:02
There is a mold, a grey, fuzzy
30:06
genuinely ugly mould that attacks grapes in damp autumns.
30:13
Most years, in most places, it's a disaster.
30:17
It splits the skins, it rots the crop.
30:21
Growers lose sleep over it, but in a few blessed corners of the world, a certain stretch of river and Bordeaux above all.
30:32
The mornings are misty and the afternoons are dry, and that's exactly the rhythm that turns the monster into a miracle
30:43
The mold pierces the grape skin gently, like a thousand tiny pinpricks, and the afternoon sun pulls the water out through the holes.
30:54
The grape shrivels, it turns brown, and then purple gray.
31:00
Then something close to a moldy raisin
31:04
it becomes honestly the ugliest fruit you will ever see deliberately carried into a winery.
31:14
And inside that ruined-looking berry, everything that matters has been concentrated.
31:21
The sugar, the acid, the perfume.
31:25
Pickers walk the same row again and again, sometimes five or six passes across the season, taking only the berries the mould has finished with.
31:39
They call it noble rot—Botrytis—and the wine it makes is liquid gold: honeyed, luminous, and very nearly immortal.
31:52
Years ago, one of the great chroniclers of our corner of the wine world, the writer behind Yossie's Corkboard, Yossie Horwitz.
32:03
wrote a piece about exactly these wines, and I'm gonna lean in on it for a few minutes.
32:11
Because he told it right.
32:14
He opens with the legend of the category.
32:18
The famous Sauternes estate
32:21
whose 1811 vintage set the world auction record for white wine, whose bottles from 1893
32:32
were in his words supposedly drinking well, more than a century later.
32:38
That legend isn't kosher, so it isn't ours to pour.
32:44
And one breath of it is all it gets tonight.
32:48
It matters for only one reason.
32:51
It proves that wine can be built to outlive everyone who touches it
32:56
Reputation through longevity is older than every scoring system on Earth
33:05
But here's what the corkboard piece was actually about.
33:10
And this part is ours.
33:13
The same noble rot.
33:16
That same misty riverbank, that same near-immortal gold—but kosher bottles.
33:25
He wrote about Château Guiraud, the First Growth of Sauternes classified in 1855,
33:34
whose kosher cuvée from 2001 he called—and I quote—'one of the best kosher dessert wines out there, period.'
33:44
He also wrote about Château Piada, Sauternes from 2006, his own go-to dessert wine for years.
33:53
He even reached beyond Bordeaux to the Loire, to a Bonnezeaux from Château de Fesles, 1997,
34:03
that he described the way you describe a person you're a little in love with.
34:10
And before you ask, this is not ancient history.
34:14
As I record this, a kosher cuvée of Guiraud, the 2017, is sitting on retail shelves right now.
34:26
The category is alive.
34:29
And you can put that wine in your cellar this month, and your grandchildren could plausibly open it at their own simchas.
34:39
Let me say that again, because it's the whole chapter in one sentence.
34:45
For the price of a nice dinner, you can buy a kosher wine tonight
34:50
that is fully expected to outlive you.
34:55
How is that even possible?
34:57
What lets one wine cross decades
35:00
While another, a wine that costs more, scored higher, came in a heavier bottle, falls apart in five years.
35:10
Six things, and I'll give them to you the way I'd give them to you at a Kiddush, not in a lab.
35:18
First is balance, nothing shouting over anything else
35:24
Second is acidity, the spine.
35:27
A wine with no acid has no posture, and posture is what holds it up for 40 years.
35:37
3.
35:38
Third: tannins or sweetness.
35:41
The preservatives nature built in.
35:44
Red wines lean on tannins
35:46
And Sauternes wears its sugar like armor.
35:51
Fourth, concentration.
35:55
There has to be enough material in the glass to evolve.
36:00
You can't age an idea
36:03
5.
36:05
Careful winemaking.
36:07
Clean fruit, honest cellar work.
36:10
Faults don't mellow.
36:12
They fester.
36:14
And finally, six, proper storage.
36:18
Cool, dark, still.
36:21
A great wine, badly stored, is a library wine in the rain.
36:27
And one image to carry all six, the way I've come to think about it.
36:33
A wine doesn't really improve with age.
36:36
It's not becoming something else
36:38
Aging is a wine slowly telling you the rest of what it had to say.
36:45
The fruit quiets down and underneath it.
36:49
If the wine has anything else to say at all, you start to hear the second voice, the honey underneath the apricot.
36:58
The Earth Under the Cherry.
37:01
The 1992 Chalk Hill in Chapter 1 didn't survive despite 24 years.
37:09
It needed them to finish its sentence.
37:12
Now why am I telling you all this?
37:15
The fungus, the acid, the armor, in this episode, the one about what makes a wine iconic.
37:22
Because of a fact about Jewish life so obvious, we forget to be amazed by it.
37:30
Wine is our clock.
37:33
Think about it.
37:34
When Shabbat comes in, we don't mark it with a food or a song alone or a bell.
37:41
The Gemara in tractate Pesachim teaches: remember the day of Shabbat
37:46
over wine.
37:47
Zachrehu al hayayin.
37:50
Of everything on the table, wine is what sanctifies time
37:56
And it doesn't stop there.
37:58
Walk through a Jewish life and count the cups.
38:02
A cup at the Brit.
38:03
Days old, and there's already wine there in the room
38:07
Four cups at the Seder every single year—a calendar in miniature—a cup under the chuppah, and the Sheva Brachot after it.
38:19
and Havdallah closing every Shabbat exactly the way Kiddush opens it, a cup at each end, like bookends, on the holiest day of the week
38:33
In Psalms, it says wine gladdens the heart of man.
38:38
But in our tradition, it does something more specific than that.
38:42
It marks. No other food, no other drink, is asked to stand at this many of life's doorways.
38:52
So when a people whose wine already marks time,
38:56
gets hold of a bottle that holds time, a wine built across decades, something doubles
39:05
A bottle laid down by one generation and opened by another isn't just a beverage anymore.
39:13
It's a vessel of memory.
39:16
Drinking a mature wine at a Jewish table can feel
39:21
And I mean this precisely, like sharing a glass with somebody who isn't in the room, the person who bought it, the person who kept it.
39:31
The world it came from, the wine crossed the years, so that they could be at the table here tonight.
39:38
I know this precisely because of my father's cellar.
39:43
My father laid down wines with intent.
39:47
In the basement of the family home in West Orange.
39:50
Yes, the same basement.
39:53
the same cellar, the chapter one's flood came through.
39:58
That room holds most of this episode.
40:02
If you're keeping track, and among the bottles he kept there were cases of Carmel Cabernet Sauvignon.
40:10
From 1976 and 1978, Israeli wine before almost anyone believed Israeli wine deserved any recognition at all.
40:20
Those wines were made by a man named Israel Flam, the first trained, credentialed winemaker in the State of Israel,
40:29
trained in UC Davis, decades before Israeli wineries collected such men.
40:35
If tonight's episode has a grandfather generation, Israel Flam is standing in it.
40:44
When part of my father's collection eventually made its way to me, I gave it the most protected room my own house had to offer.
40:53
The bomb shelter.
40:55
And yes, I mean that literally, a bomb shelter, racked out for wine.
41:01
If you intend your bottles to outlive you, store them like you mean it.
41:07
A few years back, in 2016, down in that shelter-turned-cellar, Jay Buchsbaum and I found one of those cases—the 1976.
41:19
40 years old.
41:21
And here's what I want you to notice about what happened next.
41:26
Chapter one of this episode was a gala.
41:31
Ten courses, a room full of people, a thousand dollars a plate.
41:37
This was the opposite of that.
41:39
This was two men sitting down in my cellar among the racks.
41:44
No menu, no audience, nobody to impress, and nobody to disappoint.
41:50
Just the two of us and a corkscrew and a case with 1976 stamped
41:56
on the cardboard.
41:58
The same held breath as chapter one, at one percent of the occasion.
42:04
We opened it and it was delicious, surprisingly, movingly delicious
42:10
A 40-year-old Israeli cabernet from a country the wine world hadn't taken seriously yet when it was bottled.
42:18
Sitting in a basement in the dark, patiently finishing its sentence, waiting for someone to listen.
42:27
My father bought that case.
42:30
When Israeli wine was an act of faith.
42:33
He never knew that one evening, forty years on, his son would sit in a cellar with a friend
42:41
and hear exactly what that faith had been saving up to say.
42:47
That's the generational table.
42:50
Sometimes it seats a hundred people at a benefit.
42:55
Sometimes it seats two.
42:57
On folding chairs, under a house.
43:00
The wine doesn't care about the size of the room, it only cares that somebody kept it
43:07
and that somebody came back.
43:09
And I'll note the season because the timing was no accident
43:14
The Corkboard piece I leaned on tonight was written as a Rosh Hashanah piece: sweet wines for a sweet year.
43:24
And you are hearing this in Elul
43:27
With the Yamim Noraim a few weeks off.
43:31
There is no better month on the calendar to put your first honest-to-goodness aging bottle in a quiet corner.
43:40
Buy the sweetness now; open the time later.
43:45
Now I told you, my father laid wines down with intent.
43:50
The Carmels were part of it, but there was another case in his cellar, a French one, and the story of how that got there, why a man like my father bought that wine in that year.
44:04
And the story of the single New York evening, decades later, when it was finally poured, and for whom?
44:13
I need to tell you about my father.
44:16
My parents came of age in Britain, in a Europe that doesn't quite exist anymore.
44:23
And here's something that surprises people today.
44:27
So I'll say it plainly as history.
44:29
Because it is history.
44:31
In that world decades ago, plenty of Jews, observant Jews, shul-going, Shabbat-keeping Jews, drank non-kosher wine
44:41
Not out of rebellion, out of reality.
44:44
Fine kosher wine, as you and I understand those words tonight.
44:49
Essentially did not exist.
44:51
The category hadn't yet been invented.
44:54
That was simply the world as they found it.
44:57
And my father, my father genuinely loved good wine
45:02
Not as a trophy, as a pleasure he understood.
45:06
He had the palate, and he had the patience, which was much, much rarer.
45:12
So here's the part I want you to hold on to
45:15
When quality kosher wine finally began to exist, when it started, bottle by bottle to become possible, my father didn't buy it as a curiosity.
45:27
He didn't buy it to support a cause, and he certainly didn't buy it as an investment.
45:34
He bought it for Shabbat.
45:36
That was the whole idea.
45:38
And I find it more beautiful every year I think about it.
45:42
The best wine he could find, brought home for the holiest table he had.
45:48
The wine finally deserved the day.
45:51
He'd been waiting for that.
45:53
Which brings us to 1986.
45:55
If you're with us for $5 for two bottles evening, you know what kosher wine meant to most of the world in 1986.
46:06
And if you weren't, one sentence covers it.
46:09
It meant sweet, it meant simple, and it meant something you apologized for.
46:15
That was the reputation, and that was the joke
46:19
And into that world came an announcement that must have sounded almost like a misprint, a Rothschild wine kosher.
46:30
Baron Edmond de Rothschild's wine company—the branch of the family behind Château Clarke in Listrac-Médoc—together with Royal Wine and the Herzog family,
46:42
produced a kosher cuvée, the Barons Edmond et Benjamin de Rothschild Haut-Médoc, made at Château Clarke itself:
46:53
the first quality French wine ever exported kosher.
46:58
And the first time, one of the truly great names of Bordeaux.
47:02
The name, arguably.
47:05
the family, whose very surname means wine to half of the world, put its own name on a kosher label for the world.
47:15
Think about what that actually was.
47:18
Not a wine.
47:19
A statement, a declaration printed on a label that kosher wine was allowed to be great.
47:26
That the word kosher and the word Bordeaux could live on the same piece of paper without either one flinching.
47:35
And on the other side of that handshake stood the Herzogs
47:40
A family that carries, in its own telling, eight generations of winemaking memory back to 19th-century Czechoslovakia.
47:51
Old World Wine Royalty and Old World Jewish winemaking signing the same label
47:58
My father saw that label, and my father, the man who had waited his whole life for wine like this to exist on his Shabbat table, bought a case.
48:09
Actually bought the case.
48:11
For Shabbat, not for a vault, I need you to understand that the case was meant to be drunk.
48:20
That's what makes everything that follows matter.
48:23
But cases like that have a way of becoming precious faster than becoming empty
48:29
And somewhere along the years, that case, what remained of it, passed from my father's cellar to mine.
48:37
And I did what we do.
48:40
What the whole episode keeps circling.
48:43
I looked after it.
48:44
I didn't fully own that wine, and I knew it.
48:48
I was keeping it for a table that would deserve it.
48:52
Thirty-four years later, after that vintage, February 2020.
49:00
in the last innocent weeks before the world shut its doors, the table arrived.
49:06
Herzog and Royal Wine threw an evening in New York to celebrate the partnership
49:13
30 years of Rothschild Kosher Wine, the anniversary of everything that 1986 label had started
49:22
And they didn't do it halfway.
49:24
The venue was the Fulton.
49:26
Jean-Georges Vongerichten's restaurant down at Pier 17 on the East River, one of the temples of New York dining.
49:35
And for one night, one night only, it was made completely kosher.
49:41
The kitchen turned over, and the whole operation transformed
49:44
so that Jean-Georges himself could cook a kosher menu in his own house.
49:51
Snapper, ceviche, duck, black sea bass, beef filet.
49:58
If you've ever wondered what it takes to make an evening literally unrepeatable, that's what it takes.
50:06
And the guest of honor had crossed an ocean to be there, Baroness Ariane de Rothschild.
50:14
The family itself in the room.
50:17
She spoke that night about the partnership, about shared values, about what these thirty years had meant, and she raised a glass.
50:28
And I can quote her exactly because it was reported at the time.
50:33
And I happen to also be in the room.
50:37
So she said, here's to the next 30 years.
50:42
Now, here's the detail that sets up everything.
50:46
Look at what was poured that night.
50:49
Rothschild champagnes.
50:51
A new kosher cuvée of Château Clarke,
50:55
the anniversary edition of the Haut-Médoc, the 2014, the 2015, and the 2016.
51:03
Beautiful wines, every one of them
51:06
And every one of them new.
51:09
Current releases.
51:11
The evening was built to celebrate a wine, and the wine it celebrated, the original, the nineteen eighty six itself, wasn't on the menu.
51:20
You can toast a legend all night without ever actually meeting it.
51:26
Except that in my cellar there was a case with its name on it.
51:32
So I brought bottles, bottles of the actual 1986, my father's wine, the founding wine, the wine this entire evening existed to commemorate
51:45
More than three decades old.
51:47
And I have to be honest with you about the fear, because the fear is half the story.
51:53
You know this from chapter one.
51:56
A wine that old promises nothing.
51:59
Pour it proudly at an evening like that, and you are gambling in public
52:04
with your father's wine in front of the family whose name is on the label at their own anniversary
52:13
If that bottle had faded, if 34 years had hollowed it out, it wouldn't just be a dead wine in a glass.
52:22
It would be a small tragedy, performed live, for exactly the audience you'd least want watching
52:30
So we didn't pour it proudly.
52:32
We poured it quietly.
52:34
Jay Buchsbaum, vice president at Royal Wine, my co-conspirator from the cellar.
52:41
Chapter three, a man who has stood next to me at more of these moments than anyone, Jay and I slipped into the back with one bottle, just us
52:52
And we had an understanding, unspoken but complete.
52:57
If this wine is gone, it dies here, in the back, with two witnesses.
53:03
Only we would ever know
53:06
We didn't even trust it to a corkscrew.
53:09
We had an Ah-So, the two-pronged cork puller made for exactly this moment.
53:15
Two thin blades rocked down along the sides of an old fragile cork.
53:22
So it comes out standing whole instead of crumbling
53:26
Into the wine it spent 34 years protecting.
53:31
The cork came out beautifully.
53:33
The pour, the lean-in: alive.
53:37
Not surviving, not hanging on, propped up by memory and goodwill, luscious, deep and layered, and completely, unmistakably alive
53:49
A 34-year-old Bordeaux with everything still to say, and saying it.
53:57
Jay looked at me.
53:59
I looked at Jay.
54:01
and back in the room of the Fulton got very quiet for a moment, because we both understood what we were now holding.
54:10
Not a risk anymore, a gift
54:13
So we walked out into the room, and the founding wine was poured at its own anniversary, poured for the baroness.
54:22
And for the teams from both houses—Rothschild's people and Royal's—the family whose names my father had trusted enough 34 years earlier
54:33
To bring home for Shabbat and the family that had carried the partnership since.
54:40
The wine the evening was built around, appearing in it
54:44
like a guest everyone had toasted and no one expected to arrive.
54:50
I'll add a confession here, because it makes the ending better.
54:54
I hadn't brought only the 86
54:57
I'd pulled a few other vintages of Haut-Médoc from my cellar as insurance against exactly the fear
55:06
I've been describing.
55:08
We poured them as well and let the record show the original, the founding vintage, the oldest bottle on the table, outshone every one of them
55:19
I've asked you twice tonight whether you remember the wine first or the people.
55:26
I want you to notice that in this story, the biggest wine story I have
55:32
I can't separate them anymore.
55:34
The wine is my father buying a case the year the world changed.
55:39
The wine is Jay in the back room sharing the risk so that I wouldn't hold it alone, and the silly grin on both our faces when we first tasted it
55:53
The wine is that room.
55:55
Three generations of two families, one label between them.
56:00
Ask me what the 1986 tasted like, and I'll tell you the truth
56:05
It tasted like every one of those people at once.
56:09
A case bought by my father for Shabbat, kept by his son for thirty four years, opened in fear in a back room
56:18
between friends and poured alive for the heirs of the people who made it.
56:25
That bottle did not merely survive three decades.
56:29
It brought its own past into the room
56:32
So that's the high road to iconic history, patience, a generation of waiting, and a room that understood what it was drinking
56:44
But I don't want to leave you thinking that's the only road, that a wine needs a Rothschild and 34 years to earn a place in your story.
56:56
Because sometimes a wine does it in one sip.
57:00
Sometimes a wine becomes unforgettable in the first ten seconds.
57:06
by being nothing like what you expected—no history required, no patience required, just a cork, a glass, and a map quietly redrawing itself in your head.
57:22
Chapter 4 was the long road to iconic.
57:26
34 years, two families, a back room.
57:30
Now let me show you the shortcut
57:33
Because sometimes a wine doesn't need decades to get into your biography.
57:39
Sometimes it kicks the door open in 10 seconds.
57:43
by tasting like something it had no business tasting like.
57:48
Everyone who loves wine is carrying a private map
57:52
Quietly, without ever writing it down.
57:56
You know what things are supposed to taste like.
57:59
Sancerre tastes like this.
58:02
Cabernet tastes like that.
58:05
The map is useful.
58:07
It's how you order off a list with confidence.
58:10
And the wines you never forget are the ones that grab a corner of that map and redraw it while you're holding the glass.
58:20
Let me tell you about mine.
58:22
Sancerre, the Loire's most famous white: Sauvignon Blanc grown on chalk
58:30
and marl at the eastern end of the river.
58:35
And for a lot of drinkers, the very definition of that grape
58:41
The citrus, cut grass, gun flint, a wine like a cold stream.
58:49
That's the map
58:51
And for kosher drinkers, for years, that map had a hole in it.
58:56
A real kosher Sancerre was vanishingly rare.
59:02
When one finally appeared properly on the American market, the review that greeted it came from Yossie's Corkboard, Yossie Horwitz's much-loved wine newsletter—
59:15
the same Corkboard whose Sauternes piece carried chapter three—called it, and I'm quoting, 'one of the only real kosher Sancerre wines'
59:27
available.
59:28
The wine was Roger Moreux Sancerre from the village of Chavignol.
59:35
And Chavignol deserves a little shout out
59:39
A tiny storied village folded into some of the steepest, whitest slopes in the region.
59:47
Soil so famous.
59:49
that connoisseurs argue about the way they argue about vintages.
59:55
This is not a wine from somewhere in France.
59:59
This is a wine from a dot on a map
01:00:02
and you can taste the dot.
01:00:05
There's even a legend built into this label.
01:00:08
The vintage before the one I'm about to describe, the 2007, never officially made it to America at all.
01:00:15
It slipped around the edges of the import system, hand to hand, and the people who tasted it still bring it up.
01:00:24
The way you'd mention a concert, you can't prove you attended
01:00:29
So, when the 2012 surfaced, first at the Kosher Food and Wine Experience, the Great February carnival
01:00:38
Of our corner of the wine world.
01:00:41
And then miracle of miracles on actual store shelves.
01:00:46
People who knew pounced.
01:00:49
The review of it ended with an instruction I've never forgotten, because it's the least critic-like sentence a critic ever wrote
01:00:58
Buy all the bottles you can find and then pester your retailer for more.
01:01:04
I got bottles, and I opened one, expecting the map.
01:01:08
Citrus, grass, stone, stream.
01:01:13
What came out of that glass instead was lychees.
01:01:17
Lychees: an exotic fruit.
01:01:20
Tropical and perfumed and completely gloriously wrong.
01:01:26
I stood there like a man who'd unlocked the front door and walked into somebody else's nicer apartment.
01:01:33
This was a Sauvignon Blanc from Chavignol?
01:01:38
From the coldest, chalkiest, most classical address the grape has?
01:01:43
Nobody expects the tropics
01:01:46
from a French riverbank.
01:01:49
And here's what I love most, looking back.
01:01:52
I have the receipts.
01:01:54
The reviewer's published note from back then, listing blooming flowers
01:01:59
citrus zest, slate minerals, and sitting there, in the middle of the list, a hint of tropical fruit and warm spices
01:02:10
with an intriguing salinity that made it—his words—'one for the ages.'
01:02:18
So it wasn't my imagination, and it wasn't one strange bottle.
01:02:23
The surprise was there in the wine.
01:02:27
On the record from day one, I just got to be one of the people it happened to.
01:02:35
Now, the honest ending, because this episode tells the truth, even when a neater story is available, I kept bottles, and I went back to them over the years
01:02:47
And with age, that wild tropical voice settled down.
01:02:52
The lychees faded.
01:02:54
Grapefruit and citrus moved in.
01:02:57
And it became a lovely, poised, familiar Sancerre—the map restored, still a very good wine.
01:03:06
I enjoyed every bottle, but the version I'll be describing for the rest of my life is the first one.
01:03:14
Both versions were beautiful.
01:03:16
Only one of them changed me.
01:03:19
And that's the lesson of this whole chapter.
01:03:22
Sometimes a wine becomes iconic because it teaches you that a grape can be more than you thought it was.
01:03:31
So your turn, same as every chapter, find a bottle in your memory that made you say the magic sentence.
01:03:41
Not, this is delicious.
01:03:44
The other one, I didn't know wine could taste like that.
01:03:48
Whatever bottle just came to mind, that wine is on your iconic list.
01:03:54
whether you knew you had a list or not.
01:03:57
Now remember, the winemaker from chapter 2, the one with the Napa story and the best score they ever got?
01:04:07
I told you you'd meet him properly before the night is out.
01:04:11
And you will.
01:04:12
One chapter from now.
01:04:14
But I can't leave the subject of map redrawing wines.
01:04:18
without telling you what that man does with white grapes, because the Sancerre's surprise was a gift from the vineyard.
01:04:28
His surprises are premeditated.
01:04:32
His first year working in Israel, decades ago now, he made a Sauvignon Blanc at the Tishby Winery using techniques he'd absorbed from the New Zealand school
01:04:45
Protect the fruit, chase the aromatics, bottle the sunshine.
01:04:50
And the story goes, he told it at this very table, that Daniel Rogoff
01:04:56
For years, the most influential wine critic in Israel, of blessed memory, was dining in a Tel Aviv restaurant
01:05:05
drinking Cloudy Bay, the New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc that was then probably the most fashionable white wine on planet Earth
01:05:15
The staff poured him the Israeli bottle next to it, and the great man swore it tasted just like Cloudy Bay.
01:05:26
An Israeli kosher wine from a winery nobody was bragging about?
01:05:31
Standing shoulder to shoulder with the most famous Sauvignon Blanc in the world.
01:05:37
The map redrawn, this time on purpose.
01:05:41
Years later, at another Israeli winery, and I'm deliberately not naming it yet,
01:05:47
It's chapter six's name, and I'm saving it.
01:05:52
He bottled his final wine there, the wine's first ever reserve Sauvignon Blanc.
01:06:00
He tells the story of the press launch, a room full of journalists, dozens of conversations, bottles opening everywhere
01:06:10
and from two or three meters away, across the noise, he could smell his own wine every time somebody poured it.
01:06:19
Guava filled the room.
01:06:22
From a glass he couldn't even see, a wine that announced itself from across a party.
01:06:29
I've been to a lot of launches.
01:06:32
Almost nothing does that.
01:06:35
So there are two ways a wine redraws your map.
01:06:40
Sometimes the vineyard does it.
01:06:42
A cold chalk slope in Chavignol decides, one vintage, to dream about the tropics; and sometimes a winemaker does it—a stubborn craftsman
01:06:55
Aims a grape somewhere it's never been, and hits the target dead center.
01:07:02
Either way, the moment is the same.
01:07:05
The glass stops behaving
01:07:08
your eyebrows go up, and the corner of your world is permanently bigger than it was one sip ago.
01:07:18
But there's a third road, stranger than both, a wine whose strangeness was nobody's plan.
01:07:26
Not the vineyard showing off, not the winemaker's technique, just the grape's own natural voice saying something unfashionable, and a winemaker with the nerve not to silence it
01:07:41
The wine got punished with one of the harshest scores of its year, and crowned the best wine in its country.
01:07:50
You've been waiting for this since chapter two.
01:07:54
It's time.
01:07:56
His name is Lewis Pasco.
01:07:59
The Napa story in chapter 2, that was Lewis.
01:08:03
The Sauvignon Blanc that fooled the great Israeli critic into tasting New Zealand.
01:08:09
Lewis.
01:08:10
The guava you could smell from three meters across the crowded press launch? Lewis.
01:08:18
And if that name rings a bell for regulars of this show, it should.
01:08:22
A couple of years back, Lewis Pasco.
01:08:25
sat exactly where I'm sitting now at this table, with a row of his own bottles between us, and told these stories into these microphones himself.
01:08:36
Go back and find that episode.
01:08:38
It's one of my favorites we've ever made.
01:08:41
Tonight, we're getting the one story from that afternoon I've been saving.
01:08:47
The best one.
01:08:49
Because Lewis Pasco was founding winemaker of Recanati.
01:08:54
There's chapter 5's withheld name, paid in full.
01:08:58
when the Recanati Winery came to life at the turn of the millennium.
01:09:03
Lewis, California raised, Davis trained.
01:09:07
Opinionated, to say it mildly, in the way that only very good winemakers can afford to be, was a man handed the keys to vintage number one.
01:09:18
Now put yourself in his boots for 2001's harvest.
01:09:23
A harvest I'll note in passing, tangled up with Shemitah, the sabbatical year
01:09:29
Which deserves and will someday get an episode of its own.
01:09:33
You're a brand new winery.
01:09:35
Your own serious vineyards are planted, but baby vines make baby wine
01:09:42
The good blocks you've contracted aren't ready to give you greatness yet.
01:09:48
And you're expected by your owners.
01:09:51
by the market and by your own pride to produce a flagship, a special reserve.
01:09:59
From what exactly?
01:10:01
The answer came from the north.
01:10:03
Alex up at Dalton offered some fruit.
01:10:07
Serious quantities of it.
01:10:09
the better part of a hundred tons.
01:10:12
And the offer came with a custom that Lewis knew well from California.
01:10:17
One of those quiet rituals
01:10:20
of the wine trade that civilians never see.
01:10:23
Here are the vineyard blocks on the table.
01:10:26
Walk them.
01:10:27
Pick the ones you want.
01:10:29
The grower keeps the crown jewels, of course.
01:10:32
Nobody hands those over.
01:10:34
But in the second tier, there's a gamble available to a man with a good eye.
01:10:40
Maybe you can see something in those rows that their own grower can't
01:10:46
And Lewis could.
01:10:48
Here's what he looked for.
01:10:49
And I'll tell you openly, that's when he explained this at my table
01:10:54
He laughed, and he said he was giving away something that ought to be proprietary.
01:11:00
In Germany, on the Mosel.
01:11:03
Growers kill for south-facing slopes, chasing every weak ray of northern sun.
01:11:10
Israel has the opposite problem.
01:11:13
Our sun is a hammer
01:11:15
So Lewis went looking for north-facing slopes, high up, around 800 meters, around Kerem Ben Zimra, high in the Galilee.
01:11:26
Rows where the vines stand in their own shade for part of the day, ripening slowly, holding their acid, keeping their secrets
01:11:37
the opposite of the European instinct, because we live in the opposite country.
01:11:44
He picked his blocks, and he made the 2001 Recanati Special Reserve.
01:11:51
Now the wine, Cabernet Sauvignon mostly, dark fruit structure, everything a flagship needs
01:12:00
and running straight through the middle of it, unmissable, unapologetic, a streak of green
01:12:08
Let me teach you something about green, the way Lewis taught it.
01:12:13
Cabernet Sauvignon carries green in its genes.
01:12:17
It's a family trait.
01:12:19
Its cousin, Cabernet Franc, practically leads with it.
01:12:23
And professional tasters, trained ones, have a humbling little secret.
01:12:29
Put them in a group, and about the only thing they'll all agree on is that a wine is green.
01:12:36
Which green?
01:12:37
bell pepper green, herb green, leaf, stem, that splinters ten ways instantly.
01:12:45
We all think we can name it.
01:12:48
Mostly we're narrating
01:12:50
But this wine—this wine's green resolved, clear as a bell, into mint. And not just any mint: nana,
01:12:59
fresh Nana, the mint of every glass of tea from Morocco to Jerusalem.
01:13:05
And I love the question Lewis asked himself, standing over those tanks.
01:13:11
because it's the question of a man discovering rather than designing: What wine smells like nana?
01:13:19
Nothing was done to the wine to make it happen.
01:13:23
No tricks, no technique, no chapter-two cellar rescue.
01:13:28
Lewis is blunt about it
01:13:31
That's just the grapes: the right rows on the right slope, picked at the right time.
01:13:38
a high, cool, north-facing hillside in the Galilee had spoken in its own accent.
01:13:46
And here is the part that makes him the hero of this chapter
01:13:51
He had the nerve to leave it in, not to rip it out with a riper picking or bury it under oak until the wine tasted like everywhere else
01:14:02
He heard an accent, and he let the wine keep it.
01:14:06
So the two thousand one Special Reserve went out into the world with its Nana streak and its cool slope freshness.
01:14:16
And the world sent back two verdicts.
01:14:19
Verdict, Wine Spectator, the major American magazine of Chapter 2's tease.
01:14:28
Tasted it and delivered one of the harshest scores a serious Israeli red wine has ever received.
01:14:37
Right around 80 points
01:14:39
Their words: 'thin and acidic'—a shrug in print from the most-read wine publication in America.
01:14:49
Verdict 2.
01:14:50
The same wine traveled to Bordeaux, to the major international competition held alongside Vinexpo, the wine world's great trade fair.
01:15:03
French palates, Bordeaux winemakers, professors, professionals, and that jury gave it the trophy as the best wine in the State of Israel
01:15:15
While they were at it, this detail is Lewis's and it's delicious.
01:15:21
They found the other wines in the lineup heavy and clumsy.
01:15:26
Same wine, same vintage.
01:15:29
How?
01:15:30
And here's where I want to be careful and fair, the way we were with Robert Parker.
01:15:36
Because the Spectator's tasters were not fools, and Lewis himself will tell you so.
01:15:43
It's context.
01:15:45
Picture the American tasting
01:15:48
A flight of Israeli reds tasted together.
01:15:52
And in those years, Israeli reds mostly meant ripe, dark, muscular wine.
01:15:59
wines.
01:16:00
Into the lineup walks a lighter-colored, higher-acid, mint-edged wine from a shaded hillside. Next to its neighbors,
01:16:11
it reads as thin. In Bordeaux, in front of palates raised on restraint and freshness, the same qualities read as elegance, and the neighbors read as bullies.
01:16:25
Neither jury lied.
01:16:27
Each jury tasted the lineup it was standing in, which is the deepest thing I know about scores
01:16:36
It took me until chapter six to be able to say it.
01:16:40
A score doesn't measure the wine.
01:16:43
It measures the room.
01:16:46
Lewis wanted to take out an ad.
01:16:49
I have to tell you this because it's the single best thing anyone has ever proposed doing with a bad review.
01:16:57
A quarter page, he suggested, laid out clean.
01:17:02
Wine Spectator 80 points.
01:17:05
Vinexpo Bordeaux: Best Wine in Israel.
01:17:08
And underneath four words, try it, you decide.
01:17:12
The winery never ran it.
01:17:15
I'd have framed it.
01:17:18
Here's what 2001 Special Reserve settles.
01:17:23
For me, once and for all, distinctiveness is not a defect.
01:17:28
Not every wine tastes correct.
01:17:32
The wines we remember, the ones we make lists like tonight.
01:17:37
Very often have an edge, a tension, a strange and particular detail, that a generic scorecard reads as an error, and your memory files as a fingerprint
01:17:51
Character is not what's left over when you remove the flaws.
01:17:56
Character is what a wine says when somebody has the nerve to let it speak.
01:18:02
And say the kosher part plainly, because this chapter proves it better than any argument.
01:18:09
Kosher wine is not one flavor profile.
01:18:13
It is not a category that behaves.
01:18:16
Tonight alone, it has been a 30-year-old Cabernet from California.
01:18:22
in full voice; a botrytized Sauternes built to outlive us; a Loire white dreaming of the tropics;
01:18:31
And an Israeli red with nana in its soul that beat the whole country in Bordeaux.
01:18:38
Kosher wine isn't a lesser shelf.
01:18:41
It's a full-size world, classic, strange, age-worthy, regional, occasionally magnificent, and it does not need anyone's permission
01:18:53
to have a personality.
01:18:55
So, six chapters.
01:18:58
Count what we've gathered.
01:19:00
Survival and surprise in a flood-scarred case.
01:19:03
The limits of the number, longevity and the table that passes wine between generations, history and a bottle that walked into its own anniversary.
01:19:16
discovery in a glass of lychee that had no right to exist, and now character, the nerve to be particular.
01:19:26
But there's one element left, and here's the thing.
01:19:29
It isn't missing.
01:19:31
It's been hiding in plain sight inside every single story I've told you.
01:19:36
Everyone, go back and look.
01:19:39
The flooded case had a worried winemaker in the room.
01:19:43
The 1986 had a father, a friend, and a baroness.
01:19:48
Even Lewis's stories are full of people.
01:19:52
An Alex with vineyard blocks, a critic at a Tel Aviv table, a room full of journalists.
01:20:00
It's time to name it the closing, the people at the table.
01:20:05
So let's name it the element that was hiding inside every story tonight.
01:20:11
Not one of these bottles became iconic alone.
01:20:14
Not one.
01:20:16
A wine in a sealed bottle in the dark room is only a promise.
01:20:21
Somebody has to be there when it's kept, and somebody has to be there when it's opened
01:20:28
Think about who was actually in these stories.
01:20:32
The person who poured you your first real glass of wine.
01:20:36
Whoever that was for you, you just saw their face.
01:20:41
The mentor whose palate rearranged yours.
01:20:45
The parent or grandparent who bought a bottle and more importantly saved it.
01:20:52
The winemaker standing next to you, worried sick, telling you what's in the glass.
01:20:59
The chef who made the room kosher for one night.
01:21:03
The friend who slips into the back with you and shares the risk so you don't have to hold it all alone.
01:21:10
The flooded case had Alicia and a room full of people who leaned in.
01:21:16
The 1986 had my father and Jay and a baroness whose family name was on the label.
01:21:24
Even Lewis's stories, a winemaker's stories, stories about slopes and tanks and picking dates, they're crowded with people the moment you look.
01:21:36
A grower named Alex laying vineyard maps on a table, a critic in a Tel Aviv restaurant, a room of journalists smelling guava.
01:21:47
Wine does not happen to bottles, friends.
01:21:50
Wine happens to people.
01:21:53
I've asked you the same question three times tonight, and I promise we'd finish it.
01:21:59
So last time
01:22:01
Bring back the greatest bottle in your life.
01:22:04
You've had it in your pocket all evening.
01:22:07
And answer, do you remember the wine first or the people?
01:22:13
Here's my honest answer, after 60 years of tasting.
01:22:18
I can't split them anymore.
01:22:20
I remember them together
01:22:22
The taste arrives with the faces.
01:22:25
The faces arrive with the taste.
01:22:28
And I've come to believe that that's not a failure of memory.
01:22:33
That is the phenomenon.
01:22:35
That's what iconic means.
01:22:38
A wine becomes iconic at the moment it stops being separable from the people you drank it with.
01:22:45
So, the definition assembled, count it back with me, one hand, five fingers, everything tonight deposited
01:22:54
Longevity, a wine that can cross decades and arrive with something to say.
01:23:00
Place and character.
01:23:02
A dot on a map you can taste.
01:23:04
An accent nobody corrected off.
01:23:09
Surprise, the glass that redraws your map
01:23:14
Culture and family memory: wine as our clock, making Kiddush and chuppah and everything in between, carrying one generation to another's table.
01:23:28
And the people and the occasion, the elements inside all the others, the room that turns a bottle into a story.
01:23:39
Which means the answer to this episode's opening goes somewhat like this.
01:23:44
The most iconic wine may not be the wine with the highest score.
01:23:49
It may be the bottle that survived, surprised you, connected generations, and became part of your own story.
01:23:58
There's one more bottle.
01:24:01
I've saved it for last, and it's the smallest one of the night.
01:24:07
It never went to a gala.
01:24:09
It was never poured for a baroness.
01:24:12
It was never opened at all.
01:24:14
You remember where the episode began?
01:24:17
With my parents' Europe
01:24:19
where Jews who kept everything still drank the wines of the world, because our wine—the wine we have tonight—had not been born yet.
01:24:29
My mother and father knew those wines, drank them in that world at that time, and my mother's favorite—her favorite wine on earth—was Château d'Yquem,
01:24:43
the golden Sauternes, the wine of emperors, the one from chapter three that I said was not ours to pour.
01:24:54
My father who understood her once gave her a small bottle of it, the 1976.
01:25:01
And then the world turned, their children, my generation.
01:25:04
kept a kosher table, drank only kosher wine.
01:25:09
The old world's wines stopped coming to our family's table, and my mother let them go, all except one
01:25:17
That small bottle, she never opened it.
01:25:20
I think she didn't want to open it at a table her children couldn't join her at.
01:25:25
But she never gave it away either.
01:25:28
She kept it, not in a cellar, not on a shelf, in a drawer next to her bed.
01:25:34
Her favorite wine, within arm's reach, unopened
01:25:38
a remembrance, and it was there until the day she passed away.
01:25:43
1976, the same vintage as my father's Carmel, the case Jay and I opened in my cellar
01:25:52
40 years on, and found alive.
01:25:55
Two bottles from the same harvest, kept by the same family
01:26:00
One was opened at forty years old between friends and spoke.
01:26:05
The other was never opened at all, and it may be the most iconic bottle of the entire
01:26:11
episode.
01:26:12
No score, no pour, no tasting notes, just the husband who knew his wife's heart
01:26:21
and a wife who kept the old world in a drawer beside her, close enough to touch, out of respect, for the new one her children had built
01:26:33
A great old bottle does more than preserve wine.
01:26:37
It preserves time.
01:26:39
So here's my invitation, and I mean it as more than a sign-off.
01:26:45
Somewhere in your life there's been a bottle like these.
01:26:49
Maybe it's already a memory.
01:26:52
A wine that survived something or surprised you.
01:26:57
Or tasted like somebody you loved.
01:27:01
Maybe it's still waiting on its side in the dark for the table that deserves it.
01:27:07
I want to hear about it.
01:27:09
Write to the Kosher Terroir and tell me your iconic bottle, the wine, the people, and the moment that made it unforgettable
01:27:18
The bottle, the people, the moment, all three.
01:27:22
Because as tonight taught us, they don't come apart.
01:27:27
And if there's a bottle you're keeping for someone, for a child.
01:27:31
For a friend, for a table that hasn't happened yet, do me one favor.
01:27:37
Next time you walk past it,
01:27:40
Mention it kindly.
01:27:42
It's allowed to hear.
01:27:44
I'm Simon Jacob.
01:27:46
This has been the Kosher Terroir.
01:27:50
To the bottles that carry our stories, and to the people who open them with us.
01:28:06
This is Simon Jacob again, your host of today's
01:28:10
episode of the Kosher Terroir.
01:28:12
Please subscribe via your podcast provider to be informed of our new episodes as they are released.
01:28:19
If you are new to the Kosher Terroir, please check out our many past episodes.