The Kosher Terroir

Michael Kaye of Invei — Part II

Corrected transcript with timestamps

Host: Simon Jacob   ·   Guest: Michael Kaye, co-founder and winemaker, Invei   ·   Running time: about 1:09:13

Opening

[00:00:08]  Simon Jacob:  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 pour yourself a glass of wonderful kosher wine. Sit back, relax, and enjoy.

Introduction

[00:00:39]  Simon Jacob:  I'm Simon Jacob, and welcome back to The Kosher Terroir.

[00:00:44]  Some winemakers are born into it, raised between the rows with a family name on the barrel. Others arrive by accident. My guest today is the second kind, and his story shows how much of wine is about saying yes when the wrong phone call comes.

[00:01:04]  Michael spent years learning at Hagafen under Ernie Weir. He worked at Four Gates in Santa Cruz, a winery with a near-cult following. He crossed the ocean to intern at Shiloh in the Judean Hills under Amichai Lourie. He then went to the other extreme, serving as a mashgiach at E. & J. Gallo, where kosher products are measured in tanker trucks rather than barrels.

[00:01:33]  Meanwhile, back home, he was making wine in a friend's basement, and it was winning awards in homemade competitions against wines that had no kosher limits at all.

[00:01:46]  Today that basement project has a name: Invei, from invei hagefen, "the vines of the grape." Michael runs it with his partner, Rabbi Dovber Berkowitz, whose own path into wine began when a grower handed him a free ton of Zinfandel and said, essentially, "Let's see what you can do."

[00:02:10]  Invei is a winery without a vineyard and without a sign out front. It works from a garage and buys fruit from growers across the region. The lineup is unusual for kosher wines: Petite Sirah, Gewürztraminer, Muscat Canelli, and a Malbec rosé. These are wines made by someone who wants you to taste something you haven't tried before.

[00:02:40]  If you heard Michael's first visit on the show, you know his origin story. Today we go further. We'll talk about what it means to make wine from vineyards you don't own, what Gallo taught him that a garage never could, and how a mashgiach thinks when he becomes the winemaker.

[00:03:04]  So pour something interesting, ideally something you've never tried before, and join me with Michael Kaye of Invei.

Interview

[00:03:13]  Simon Jacob:  Welcome back to The Kosher Terroir, Michael.

[00:03:16]  Michael Kaye:  Thank you.

[00:03:16]  Simon Jacob:  So I'm joined by Michael Kaye from Invei. Invei HaGefen — what do you call the company, exactly?

[00:03:24]  Michael Kaye:  Invei.

[00:03:25]  Simon Jacob:  Invei.

[00:03:25]  Michael Kaye:  Invei.

[00:03:26]  Simon Jacob:  Okay.

[00:03:27]  Michael Kaye:  It comes from the phrase invei hagefen in Tanach.

[00:03:29]  Simon Jacob:  Okay. Got it. So welcome back.

[00:03:33]  Michael Kaye:  Thank you. It's good to be here.

[00:03:35]  Simon Jacob:  Good to see you. For the listeners who missed our first conversation: how did a mix-up turn a book editor into a winemaker?

[00:03:45]  Michael Kaye:  Okay, so in 2009, when the economy crashed after the housing crisis, I'd been working as a book editor for many years, and suddenly a lot of my work dried up. I was quite worried about the situation, and I spoke to one of my rabbis in Berkeley about it. He said, "Well, look, I can give you some kosher supervision, some mashgiach gigs, until things pick up." I said, "I don't know how to do that." He said, "I'll show you how to do it."

[00:04:22]  And so I started doing things — you know, bat mitzvahs, bar mitzvahs, visiting a soy sauce manufacturing plant, things like that. And then one day the rabbi calls me and says, "Look, I just got a call from the OU, and they have requested you to oversee a champagne production." And I said, "Well, that's surprising, because I've never worked for the OU and I don't know anything about champagne." Then he told me how much it paid, and I said, "I love champagne."

[00:04:56]  So the next day — I was living in the Bay Area — I drove two hours north to a place called Hopland, went to this champagne-making facility, and was looking for the person in charge. I finally found him and said, "Hi, I'm Michael. I understand you requested me for the kosher supervision." And he said, "You're not the Michael we wanted."

[00:05:22]  So he got on the phone to my rabbi, and it turned out there had been a different Michael who had lived in Berkeley several years beforehand, and that's who they thought they were getting. But now everything was already set up. They had twenty-five people there ready to do the work, as well as the vats and everything else. And so they said, "Looks like we're gonna teach you how to make champagne."

[00:05:47]  So I spent a week learning how to make champagne and overseeing things, checking with the rabbi to make sure I was also checking the kosher elements of the production. At the end of the week I'd had a great time, and they said, "Well, why don't you come and do a harvest with us in Napa?" And this turned out to be Hagafen, with Ernie Weir. Ernie wasn't at the champagne facility at the time, so I didn't know that's who it was.

[00:06:14]  I ended up working a harvest down there, and I kept telling Ernie, "Look, Ernie, I'm a book editor, and when things pick back up, I'm gonna go back to book editing." Well, I kept telling him that for five years. And at some point I had the chochmah to realize that maybe I'm supposed to be here, paying attention to the winemaking. And so I [audio gap] I could try my own hand at this.

[00:06:51]  He very graciously let me and some friends come and pick some of his second-tier grapes, and I tried my hand at winemaking at my home, and the result was disastrous.

[00:07:06]  Simon Jacob:  That was the Zinfandel, wasn't it?

[00:07:09]  Michael Kaye:  No, the Zinfandel disaster was after this. But I realized that Ernie made it look very easy, and it was not, and there was a lot for me to learn. So it was actually great that it was a failure, because then I had to learn all the things I should not be doing when making wine, and all the things I needed to do to protect the whole process.

[00:07:37]  And so the next year I went and purchased my own Syrah grapes from a place in Sonoma and made a beautiful Syrah, a small one-barrel lot. I was so excited, and people loved it, so I was like, "I'm gonna make this again." Well, after I released my wine, I reached out to the vineyard owners, and it turns out they had sold their vineyard to a home developer. So those grapes were not available.

[00:08:08]  At the same time, or roughly thereafter, a Chabad rabbi who is a friend of the family knew that I worked in wine. One of his congregants had just purchased a vineyard and offered him free grapes if he'd like to make wine for the community. So he reached out to me, knowing I was in winemaking, and said, "Hey, would you like to help me make some wine?" So I said, "Sure."

[00:08:36]  We went and looked at the vineyard, and we ended up getting a few tons — maybe a ton and a half — of Zinfandel. It turns out the grapes weren't that great, and we had issues in the facility we were using, and that Zinfandel was so bad we just dumped it in the streets of Oakland, and little children ran over the stream of vinegary wine.

[00:09:07]  I was very frustrated, but the Chabad rabbi said, "Well, do you want to choose a different grape and try it again next year?" So I said, "Okay." The next year we were walking through the vineyard, and I tried some of the Malvasia grapes, and they tasted phenomenal. They didn't taste like any other grape I'd had. They tasted like lychees and peaches — and that was just the grape. So I said, "Let's make some wine with this."

[00:09:36]  So we got new equipment, and we learned a lot, and we made this Malvasia. I wasn't quite sure how good it was, and I heard through a friend that if you submit your wine to the California State Fair, the judges will give you feedback — what's working, what's not working. I thought, okay, this would be a great chance to learn. So we submitted the wine, and a few months later I get a phone call from the head of the fair's judging committee saying, "Look, your Malvasia won the double gold." And I said, "What's the double gold?" He said, "That's when all the judges give you a gold medal — you get a double gold." I said, "Great, that's great feedback."

[00:10:20]  We were completely shocked. We really didn't anticipate that at all, and this was going against non-kosher wines — any wines. And we did that for the next three years in a row, winning double gold each year. Then we expanded and did a Muscat Canelli, which was similar to the Malvasia in that it's also a very floral, aromatic type of white wine. We made some Cab, we did a little bit of this and that, and then we finally decided: we're doing well, people like our wine, we're winning awards — why don't we get commercially licensed?

[00:11:04]  So we started that process in 2018, which requires getting the facility license and going through lots of different governmental hoops, from the city level to the federal level. We finally got our license in March of 2020 — perfectly timed for the COVID epidemic. If you remember, at the time people didn't know: can you scratch your nose, can you touch a package, how close can you be to each other even if you're outside? So we were licensed, but we didn't feel safe working, and we didn't make any wine that year.

[00:11:45]  The next year there were the fires in California, and a lot of the vineyards were really damaged by smoke taint, so we didn't do it that year either. Then finally we harvested, we made some wine — and then the Ukraine war broke out. I wouldn't have thought that affected anything in California, but it turns out Ukraine is a very large supplier of glass. The bottles. So we had wine, but now we couldn't bottle it. What normally would be a process of calling up one of the glass distributors and getting bottles that week turned into a six-and-a-half-month wait.

[00:12:30]  So we finally, technically, launched in 2023 with a rosé and our Muscat Canelli, and — let's see, what else did we have that year? Maybe we had the Gewürztraminer as well. We were just doing whites. And that began the process of really getting out into the world and being able to sell to anyone in the country — obviously over twenty-one.

[00:13:03]  We started doing private tastings for people in their homes around the country. I did a number of tours — probably did fifty or more tastings that year — where I would travel to, let's say, New York, set up five tastings in different homes, do an evening with a couple, and they would invite their friends, and people would get to enjoy the wines. While it was exhausting, it was really great, because basically it was a party each night, and people were engaging with the wine in a really pleasurable space with their friends. It was an ideal situation, which I hadn't put together until I was experiencing it.

[00:13:45]  And so that started to open up a different side of the winemaking process — which, as you know, Simon, as a collector: wine brings people together.

[00:13:57]  Simon Jacob:  Yep. That's the best part of it.

[00:13:58]  Michael Kaye:  It is. It's the best part of it. And you get to talk about the wine: I taste this, I taste that, I like this, I don't like that. It's a way of engaging, and it's fun. And people are a little bit inebriated, so they're more relaxed. It's really something.

[00:14:17]  Simon Jacob:  So I've got a follow-up question.

[00:14:19]  Michael Kaye:  Yeah.

[00:14:20]  Simon Jacob:  Looking back, what did editing books teach you that turned out to matter in winemaking?

[00:14:27]  Michael Kaye:  That's a very good question. Nobody's actually ever asked me that. The first thing that comes to mind is that as an editor, there are two aspects to editing. One is developmental editing, where you're working on the overall structure of the story, the overall development of the characters. And the other is the very nitty-gritty: Is there a comma where it should be? Is everything spaced properly? What's the font size?

[00:15:03]  And as I'm sitting here thinking, those two aspects are really reflected in the winemaking process. You're looking at the overall story, which is: What kind of grapes am I getting? Where are they coming from? How were they tended in the vineyard? And then how do we want to take them through the winemaking process? Are we going to do a cold soak, what temperature are we going to ferment at, what kind of barrels, et cetera? That's all, let's say, the character development.

[00:15:37]  But then there are the highly specific things that most consumers, and maybe even winemakers, are far less interested in, but which are essential — making sure to have the right amount of chemicals added to keep everything sanitized and protect the wine and the grapes from oxidation, microbial spoilage, et cetera. That's a very important part of the winemaking process. Thankfully, one of my teachers, Amichai, at Shiloh, where I interned in 2016, really made this point hit home, because you can get one tiny little microbe and it can spoil a ten-thousand-gallon tank. So you have to be very particular about being clean in the winery.

[00:16:28]  But what I have also found is that you have to be thoughtful and sensitive and careful when you're doing additives. For example, one of the things we deal with in California, and also in Israel, is that because of the temperature, we get very ripe grapes. You can obviously pick earlier, but if you want the fullest expression of the grape's flavors, you might harvest at, say, twenty-five, twenty-six Brix. The problem is that as the sugar's increasing and the flavors are developing, the acidity is decreasing. So oftentimes you have to make acid additions to the wine so that it's balanced and doesn't taste cloying, and also so that it preserves its freshness — much like squeezing lemon onto a salad or a fruit salad.

[00:17:27]  And you have to be very careful, because once you've added too much acid, you can't take it away. There are processes, but then it becomes super complicated and it can damage the wine. So you take a small amount of the wine, add a little bit, and finally get it to the place where — like when you're cooking and you taste — that tastes right. You can't just throw stuff in because you don't want to go through a whole day at the winery adding tartaric. You have to be patient.

[00:18:01]  And that's one thing I will definitely give my partner big kudos for. My partner is Rabbi Dovber Berkowitz, of Chabad of Walnut Creek. He is very patient with the development of the wine. I'm often saying, "We've got to move on this or it's not going to be good," and he's very good at saying, "Okay, let's see how this develops." Which is — you were sharing with me earlier that you've got a very large family, baruch Hashem, and I think with children it takes time for them to fully develop, and wine is much the same way.

[00:18:39]  So those two aspects of editing, I think, are reflected in the winemaking. And this is really the first time I've considered that.

[00:18:48]  Simon Jacob:  Did you ever meet the Michael that was supposed to be there at the winery?

[00:18:54]  Michael Kaye:  No, I didn't.

[00:18:55]  Simon Jacob:  Just curious.

[00:18:55]  Michael Kaye:  Yeah.

[00:18:58]  Simon Jacob:  Okay. It's a mystery Michael. Okay, cool.

[00:19:02]  So you've worked at a number of wineries in all sorts of functions. You've had some experience in each of these — Hagafen, Four Gates, Covenant, Shiloh, Gallo — which is about as wide a range of wine offerings as you can get, especially from kosher to even non-kosher.

[00:19:27]  Michael Kaye:  Well, actually Gallo was kosher, but it was for flavors. Gallo obviously is a very large wine manufacturer, but a section of their winery was used to create kosher food coloring from grapes. The great part about Gallo, though, was that they had a large facility for all their winemakers, with very high-end lab equipment, and they were so generous with their time and expertise. I would bring my wine to them, and they would analyze it and give me feedback, and it was really, really pleasurable.

[00:20:07]  Simon Jacob:  Awesome. So what's the one lesson you took from each of the wineries? Well — I gave you plenty of time to prepare for these, I know.

[00:20:17]  Michael Kaye:  I suppose the lesson I took from Gallo was: if you can make three and a half billion dollars net profit as a privately owned family business, you can afford a helicopter. You can fly to work.

[00:20:36]  One of the things I learned — and this goes for Gallo down to the smallest — is that you can't sweat or overstress about lost wine. Inevitably, and I think every winemaker has dealt with this in some capacity, when you're transferring wine from, say, one tank to another — which is usually the racking process; there are other moments where you're moving wine for various reasons, but that's probably the most common — there are many times when the tank you're pumping into will overflow, or the hose will burst or pop off the connecting valve because it's not tight.

[00:21:27]  Which is a really unpleasant situation, because now you've got — depending on the size of the winemaking facility — anywhere from tens of gallons to hundreds of thousands of gallons, which I literally would see at Gallo: wine spraying everywhere, a hose flying through the air, or wine overflowing the tops of tanks. And I've seen this at all the wineries. As a winemaker, and when it's a business, it can be terrifying.

[00:21:56]  Simon Jacob:  Oh my God.

[00:21:57]  Michael Kaye:  And you just have to let that stuff go. That was one of the things I noticed: the more seasoned winemakers would just say, "Yeah, it happened. Okay. Now we've got to clean, now we've got to do this. This is part of the process." And it's interesting, because winemakers are generally very detail-oriented people, and they tend to get pretty uptight about things, because in some ways you have to be that way. But with this aspect of winemaking, it seemed to be a universal "okay, that's part of the process."

[00:22:31]  But what I took from each place in particular —

[00:22:35]  Simon Jacob:  Very interesting.

[00:22:36]  Michael Kaye:  — some of what I took from each place was what I didn't want to do. At Gallo, for example — Gallo is like an oil refinery. It's so massive. They're producing 110 million cases each year at this one facility. You have to drive across it to get to the tanks. And while I may be envious of their profit, I didn't want to end up working in a refinery, because in many ways it's very impersonal, and there's not a lot of connection between the employees because there are so many. So I realized this is not what I'm looking for.

[00:23:27]  At the far end of the spectrum would be Binyamin Cantz of Four Gates, who does everything himself — a one-man show, and no equipment. I don't mean literally no equipment, but every winery I've been to uses forklifts to lift the barrels and the grapes. Binyamin does it all himself. That means he's got a full barrel that weighs 600 pounds, and he's moving it up the side of his hill, from his cellar up to where he's going to be transferring it to a tank, by himself, over milk crates.

[00:24:07]  Simon Jacob:  How does he do that?

[00:24:08]  Michael Kaye:  He takes milk crates — this is what I saw — and he builds a sort of steps with them up a hillside —

[00:24:18]  Simon Jacob:  Up a hillside.

[00:24:18]  Michael Kaye:  — and he just rolls it up himself. It's unbelievable. And I realized, okay, Binyamin's superhuman — but that's not what I want.

[00:24:34]  So I wanted to find and create something that had the personal touch I saw in the small facilities, but also had some of the processes and equipment I saw in the large facilities. And I think my partner and I have done that now. What that has allowed us to do is be experimental and try all sorts of new things. And almost inevitably, every time we think some mistake has occurred at this stage of our winemaking skills, it turns out, "Oh, that's just a different style of winemaking. There's a whole group of people — Southern Italy, France, or Davis — who only make their wine that way." So it allows us to be nimble without having everything fall on one person. Structurally, that's something I've gotten.

[00:25:42]  Simon Jacob:  You did explain Invei in the past — what it means and why you chose it. But —

[00:25:49]  Michael Kaye:  So Invei was my partner's idea, and it means "grapes of." It comes from the phrase invei hagefen, "grapes of the vine." His idea was: whatever we're making — like now we're making Barbera, Petite Sirah, Petit Verdot, for example — so, Invei Barbera: "grapes of Barbera." And also, it's a name that hadn't been taken, so that's another practical aspect of it.

[00:26:23]  But it's very interesting, because people read into the word a lot — the English word. Some people pronounce it "envy." Some people think of it as "inveigh," like to rail against the system.

[00:26:38]  Simon Jacob:  Right.

[00:26:38]  Michael Kaye:  So in a sense, it's taken on a life of its own. But that's pretty much it. We wanted it rooted in the tradition.

[00:26:47]  Simon Jacob:  So Invei doesn't have any vineyard. How do you choose growers? What are you looking for when you walk a vineyard — especially one that you don't own?

[00:26:59]  Michael Kaye:  So first I start with what kind of grape I want. Do I want, say, Barbera? Do I want Petit Verdot? Do I want a Muscat Canelli? Okay, so once I know what kind of grape I want, then I —

[00:27:13]  Simon Jacob:  How do you choose that?

[00:27:16]  Michael Kaye:  Well, that's largely come about through tasting wines and thinking, "God, I'd love to make this kind of wine." Or this kind of wine is not so available in the kosher world, or this kind of wine I think I could make better, or differently, than what's available. That happened with our dry Muscat, which is typically made semi-sweet. I think we were the first people to make a dry one in the kosher world. A phenomenal wine — really interesting, because it was very aromatic and it was dry, so it was beautiful to drink.

[00:27:57]  Once I've figured out, okay, I'd like to make this kind of wine and I'd like to do it in this style, then I do two things. First, I see whether there's anything available out there. In California, there are grape-growing boards on the web where you can see what offerings are out there. There are also newsletters and other places where growers advertise, but there's a main spot.

[00:28:30]  Once I see what's available and where it's from, then I do a few other things. I research to find out what the best terroir is for that particular grape. Usually this has to do with the temperature ranges of the weather.

[00:28:53]  Simon Jacob:  And that's based on altitude for the most part, isn't it?

[00:28:57]  Michael Kaye:  Well, not in California. It's more which side of the mountain.

[00:29:03]  Simon Jacob:  Right.

[00:29:03]  Michael Kaye:  So, for example, Pinot Noir prefers things a little bit cooler. In the Carneros region you get these marine breezes off the sea that come in and keep the weather cooler. But for a varietal like Petite Sirah, which likes things hotter, traditionally you want to be more inland. Once you go over the coastal range and go inland, there's just more heat retained in the valley there. So it's really more location than elevation, because I don't know that there's that much grown that high. There are small mountains in Napa, and we get our Barbera from the Sierra Foothills, which is at a slight elevation, but it's not huge.

[00:30:01]  Then what happens is I will first ask to get a bottle of wine that has been made from the grapes of a particular vineyard. Let's say I might choose six different vineyards across the state that are growing a particular grape, and I'll ask them to send me wines that have been made from it, or give me the names of companies that have made wine from them, if that's possible. That's often one of the main litmus tests. I can pretty much eliminate most of them, because most will not be up to the standard or the taste profile I'm looking for.

[00:30:39]  Once I narrow it down — this one seems to be producing something good — then I can go visit the vineyard and see what the growing practices are like, but also what the maintenance of the vineyard is like. One of the things I learned from Amichai: we would walk through the vineyard, when we were here in Israel, and he had developed his sensitivity so he could smell if there was something rotting in the vineyard — a cluster of grapes. He could spot it. And after a period of time, I was able to pick up on that scent as well. So you want to be able to see how clean the fruit is during its growing process, so you can have a sense that you're going to be getting clean, healthy fruit.

[00:31:33]  Then it also comes down to the people. Most of these vineyards are owned by families, and if I get a good feeling about the family, and I like the vines and the grapes and the wine that's been made, then that's the way to do it. Sometimes there are historical things. For example, our Barbera: we first got some Barbera from Central California, and it was really not good, so we didn't turn it into a wine. I subsequently did more research, and it turned out that Barbera has a long history of being made in the Sierra Foothills by Italian immigrants, because it's traditionally an Italian varietal. They found a spot that emulates Piedmont in Italy, and they produce wonderful grapes.

[00:32:26]  Simon Jacob:  Wow. That's very cool.

[00:32:28]  Michael Kaye:  Yeah.

[00:32:29]  Simon Jacob:  Very cool.

[00:32:30]  Michael Kaye:  And now, for example, I'm friends with that family. Their daughter became rodeo queen — it's kind of a random thing. I get a video on my WhatsApp one day, and here's this young woman in the Rodeo Queen procession, and the family was just so proud. They're like, "We just wanted you to know." Which is not something I thought about when I got into winemaking. But this is another way in which wine is a real connector between people.

[00:32:58]  Simon Jacob:  Very cool. Can you walk me through harvest day at Invei? Kind of hour by hour, what that's like.

[00:33:12]  Michael Kaye:  So you start off the morning completely exhausted, before anything has happened. Why? Because in the weeks leading up, you're so busy calculating and organizing all the different logistics — from getting the grapes there, to getting the tanks prepared, to making sure you have all the equipment necessary, to making sure you've got the mashgichim, and the people who are going to be cleaning things, and the forklift. There's a lot that goes into making sure everything is in place for the day the grapes arrive.

[00:33:45]  It's like the grapes are a leader of a country coming to visit, and you want to make sure that every fork has been placed properly on the grand banquet table, so that they arrive and are really cared for. So that all comes before the grapes even arrive. But then once the grapes arrive —

[00:34:06]  Simon Jacob:  When does that happen?

[00:34:11]  Michael Kaye:  Well, the ideal is that the grapes all arrive by, say, 7 a.m., maybe 8 a.m., because I like to work in the cooler part of the day for a variety of reasons — primarily for the fruit, but also because as it gets hotter and hotter during the day, it gets exhausting. But sometimes things happen. A vineyard might call me and say, "Look, our head picker called in sick this morning. We've got some other people, but it's going to be a little bit of time. We won't be there till, say, eleven." Or there's a traffic accident on the freeway, right? I can't control the entire world, as much as I think all of us would love to.

[00:35:01]  So things happen, and you have to be prepared for that mentally, and you have to prepare your crew for that. Particularly the guys who are doing a lot of the hands-on stuff are young, eager, ready to go, and if you say, "Hey, look, nothing's gonna happen for three hours, go golfing or whatever," you then have to get them motivated again three hours later when the grapes arrive.

[00:35:31]  But assuming everything runs as it should: essentially, the grapes arrive on a long flatbed truck, in half-ton bins. We lift the bins off the truck with a forklift, and they're piled in a shaded area to protect the fruit. Then we have, I think, the standard equipment most wineries have: a hopper — the receiving bin you dump the grapes into — which guides the grapes into the crusher, which crushes the grapes. Then the must, which is the grapes and the juice, gets pumped from the crusher into the tank.

[00:36:19]  While all of this is happening, there are things I'm doing as the winemaker, like getting samples of the juice and checking its pH, its sugar level, its titratable acidity. That way, if I need to make decisions right away — say, adding some tartaric acid — I can do it in the early part of the wine's process, so it integrates into the flavor and doesn't stand out awkwardly at the end as an added flavor, like too much salt.

[00:37:02]  So I'm checking that. And a lot of what I'm doing is checking the fruit. I've had this experience where somebody sells us grapes and the top layer looks great, and then as you're going down through it, you're discovering things aren't ripe, there are things that have rotted, and I've had to make the decision before: we can't use these grapes; we have to return them. So there's a quality aspect to it.

[00:37:27]  The other thing that happens in winemaking — and I've experienced this at most places — is that things break, and you have to be prepared for that. I can think of a couple of instances, not at our winery, but at other wineries, where, let's say, it's a year with less rainfall. The good thing about that is you get more concentrated flavors in the berry. The bad thing is there's less liquid in the berry, so when it's going through the crusher and into the pump, it can actually get clogged, because there's not enough liquid to move it through. Then you can have machines breaking down, and you may not even be aware of what's happening until it's happened three or four times in a row in the course of an hour. Then you have to be prepared to repair the equipment, add something, add water — figure out how you're going to manage that.

[00:38:30]  It's like a M*A*S*H operation. You're out on the battlefield, and you've got to figure these things out right now, because the fruit, especially once it's been crushed, is going to start to ferment, and you don't want it to start fermenting before you're ready — before it's in the tank, essentially. And that can happen with any number of things. There can be a sudden heat wave that day, and maybe your glycol chiller — the machine that pumps glycol around the tanks to keep the tank temperatures regulated — for example, we're generally trying to keep the tanks cold so the fermentation doesn't take off from the —

[00:39:06]  Simon Jacob:  Is that because you're doing whites? Or is it in both?

[00:39:17]  Michael Kaye:  Because what it does — these are the jackets that go around the tanks. So you're pumping glycol through the —

[00:39:26]  Simon Jacob:  They have stainless steel jackets that are integrated into the vat.

[00:39:31]  Michael Kaye:  That's correct. On many tanks you'll see these dimples all over the side of the tank, and that indicates it's got a jacket for this liquid glycol to flow through — essentially a material you can either make hot or make cold, and it will cool the tank.

[00:39:52]  And the reason we want it cooled — there are maybe three reasons. The first and most important is that we want to be able to control the rate of fermentation. So we want things to get cold right away, because at fifty degrees and above, things will ferment. They may even ferment slightly at lower temperatures, but that's generally the bottom. And once it gets to eighty-five, the multiplication of the yeast just flies off the handle, and you can have an extremely fast, sudden fermentation that you haven't really prepared yourself for.

[00:40:34]  Simon Jacob:  Is there a problem with fast? I would think you want to ferment this as fast as possible so you can put it in the bottle sooner, and everything is great.

[00:40:43]  Michael Kaye:  From that perspective, it would make a lot of sense. But from the perspective of how the wine's going to taste, there are other considerations. For example, with white grapes: if you ferment at a cooler temperature — we like to ferment around fifty, fifty-two degrees, which is very low — the fermentation goes very slowly, and it preserves more of the aromatic compounds, so you get a beautiful nose.

[00:41:15]  The second thing, whether it's white or red: while we have done natural-yeast fermentations, we generally prefer to use specific yeasts that have been shown to pair really well with particular grapes or particular winemaking styles. So we want to have some time to kill off the native yeast, which is done when we do an SO2 addition. We want the juice sitting there cold, not able to ferment, and then we want to be able to add the yeast when we're ready. By "ready," I mean you're going to be increasing the temperature of the vat, so the yeast you've added are going to begin to multiply.

[00:42:02]  But the yeast, in addition to the sugar they're eating in the juice — which is what they convert into alcohol — require other nutrients. Just like a human: there are all sorts of nutrients we need to function well. Those nutrients are often added at different stages during the fermentation. If the fermentation goes too fast, you miss the ideal range to add the nutrition, and you may end up with some off smells and off flavors, things like that.

[00:42:34]  Simon Jacob:  Cool. You've described it so beautifully. I want to tell you, I've never heard it described so precisely.

[00:42:44]  Michael Kaye:  My pleasure. Thank you.

[00:42:45]  Simon Jacob:  It's great. It's really great.

[00:42:53]  Michael Kaye:  Let me just add one other thing to that.

[00:43:00]  Simon Jacob:  Sure.

[00:43:02]  Michael Kaye:  Because we don't have the ideal lab situation, like Gallo, where they've got multi-million-dollar lab equipment and can test for everything instantaneously, we send out — as many wineries do — samples of our juice to get it analyzed, to really understand the different chemical and nutrient ratios in there. So if we buy ourselves some time by keeping the juice cool before we make any decisions about the wine and what we're going to add to it, it gives us time to get lab results so we can be more precise.

[00:43:44]  Simon Jacob:  How long does that take?

[00:43:45]  Michael Kaye:  In general, I would say it takes about two days.

[00:43:49]  Simon Jacob:  Okay, wow. So you can stop a wine from fermenting for two days?

[00:43:55]  Michael Kaye:  You could stop it for several weeks. Many people do cold soaks for red wines and keep it cold for three days, two weeks. I think Josh Rynderman [?] down in South Africa, a friend of mine, does quite a long cold soak for his reds.

[00:44:12]  Simon Jacob:  So what does that add? Color?

[00:44:16]  Michael Kaye:  You know, it's a good question. I think what it does is create smoother chemical bonds between the polyphenols — the different scent, flavor, and feel chemicals in the wine — so that you get a smoother wine. As for the extraction of color: yes, you can maybe get a little more color by doing a cold soak, but I can tell you from Gallo, where they were specifically manufacturing color from grapes, they want it as hot as possible, because it's heat that actually extracts the color.

[00:45:00]  Simon Jacob:  Okay, cool. Being a mashgiach before you were a winemaker — how does that background shape your decisions in the cellar?

[00:45:08]  Michael Kaye:  Well, the one thing it does is that if I'm researching any particular thing we might consider trying in the wine or adding to the wine — for example, there are tannin powders one can add to the wine that impart certain positive tannin flavors or tannin feels — as a former mashgiach, I know I first need to find which ones are kosher, and then from that I can select. Because if I read about one and think, "Wow, that sounds phenomenal," but it's not kosher, then I can't use it. So that's primarily where it comes up: with additives.

[00:46:00]  Simon Jacob:  What's the rest of that process?

[00:46:02]  Michael Kaye:  Yes, so let's say you've harvested, you've crushed, it's all sitting in the tank, you're ready for fermentation to begin. Right before the fermentation begins, if you've gotten your lab results back and you see the acidity is too low — that's a classic thing — then you can more precisely decide how much tartaric acid to add, which is made from grapes. It's not just some sort of cleaning acid. That also determines the pH, and therefore the stability of the wine as well, so you want to get that right.

[00:46:43]  Then, once you increase the temperature of the tank through the glycol, at a certain point you're going to be adding some of those nutritional things. Diammonium phosphate is one of the things yeast do well to have available to them as they're doing the work of munching through the sugar and converting it to alcohol. So you're monitoring the sugar level. When it gets a third of the way down — let's just say the sugar level is twenty-four Brix, so when it gets down to, I don't know, sixteen Brix — then you're going to add what we call the food for the yeast, so they have what they need to continue the process.

[00:47:35]  Because of the many things winemakers can be concerned about, one is a stuck fermentation: the yeast don't have enough nutrition to finish the job, and then you've got all sorts of complications that could occur. So you're basically trying to make sure that as the process goes through, the yeast are getting the nutrition they need, they're getting the right temperature to do their work. They're comfortable. They're being taken care of.

[00:48:08]  Then the thing we're basically monitoring through the remainder of the process is how much sugar is left. Most of the time — except for our semi-sweets and some of the ice wines we've made — we're monitoring the sugar and hoping it gets to no sugar left, which, interestingly enough, on the Brix readers — the devices we use for measuring sugar — is often actually negative one. It's kind of strange.

[00:48:42]  The reason we want it there is, first of all, we're making a dry wine in most situations, so we want that for the flavor. But it's also really important for stability. In my early years, before we became commercial, we had a vintage of wine that we thought was dry, and we bottled it. Then when it was sitting at room temperature, it started to ferment again.

[00:49:13]  Simon Jacob:  Right.

[00:49:13]  Michael Kaye:  First of all, most people don't want a bubbly Cabernet, for example. You don't want that flavor. But also, if you don't have the right closure on top of the bottle, things pop out. And I had this happen. I remember I had a few bottles, and I was driving out to visit Amichai in the Shomron — which, you know, is sometimes a place where you might get a little bit nervous about the political situation — and I heard what I thought were two gunshots. I pulled over immediately, and it turned out it was the corks in my wine that had popped out and hit the ceiling of the car, because it was a hot day and the fermentation had begun.

[00:50:02]  Simon Jacob:  Wow.

[00:50:02]  Michael Kaye:  So, yeah. You live and learn, thankfully.

[00:50:06]  Simon Jacob:  Which wines in your portfolio do you think are the most underrated?

[00:50:13]  Michael Kaye:  I'm going to say the most underrated of our wines are the Petit Verdot and the Gewürztraminer. Let's start with the Gewürztraminer. I got interested in making Gewürztraminer from doing a tour in Alsace with a friend and tasting lots of Gewürztraminers and feeling like, okay, I want to make this. That grew out of my experience of having made the Malvasia and then the Muscat Canelli, which were very highly aromatic wines. And Gewürztraminer is also very aromatic — rose petals, grapefruit, all sorts of interesting scents.

[00:50:56]  First of all, most people have never heard of Gewürztraminer. And if they have, in the kosher world in particular there's a very limited number of options to experience it. Also, although I've made it dry, we make it semi-sweet, and the reason is, first of all, I just like that flavor. I think it's just delicious. And I think a lot of people hold back from sweet wine because they think it's going to be cloying, or like Manischewitz or something. What I've found is that almost inevitably, everyone who tries the Gewürztraminer is really wowed by it, and they just love it. I'm talking about people who maybe only drink French reds, right? Because it's got an incredible aroma, it's just a beautiful flavor, and it's pleasurable to drink — particularly with spicy foods. It really goes great with very spicy foods. It's surprising, but it's just a nice balance.

[00:52:05]  The other interesting thing about Gewürztraminer is that it's one of the few whites that ages really well. I discovered this by doing some research: Gewürztraminer has certain properties in its skins that allow it to age much longer than, say, a Sauvignon Blanc or a Chardonnay. Which means, let's say you buy a case of Gewürztraminer — over the years it's going to evolve and reveal different flavors, which makes it a more interesting wine. And second, because we've kept it semi-sweet, the sugar acts as it does in jam, as a preservative. So a Gewürztraminer can last ten, twenty years, and you don't know where it's going to take you on that journey, but it's very interesting. So that's one.

[00:52:59]  The other is our Petit Verdot, which Wine Enthusiast gave a 90, so it's been recognized as a good wine — and hopefully the scores will increase over the years as we get better and better. The reason this particular vintage of Petit Verdot that we have out now is interesting is that we blended a bit of Petite Sirah into it, and it just comes together in such an interesting way. It's one of those wines — a little bit like the way most people experience orange wines. It's an interesting wine. There are a lot of layers: there's caramel, there's cigar box, there's pine, and it's got this interesting blend of savory and dark fruit.

[00:53:57]  I see it like dark chocolate. It's not as accessible as our more fruit-forward wines, but it retains a surprisingly interesting deliciousness. And it's particularly great for Shabbat, because you open it Friday night and it's very intense, very tannic, and then by Shabbos lunch a lot of that has smoothed out. So then you have the second half of the bottle, and it's a completely different wine. It's luxurious — and who doesn't like luxury with chocolate?

[00:54:41]  Simon Jacob:  I actually like luxury with chocolate. That's my craze. Is there a variety you're dying to make but haven't yet?

[00:54:52]  Michael Kaye:  I'm interested in Montepulciano.

[00:54:54]  Simon Jacob:  Okay.

[00:54:55]  Michael Kaye:  The Italian varietal. I'm interested in that.

[00:55:01]  Simon Jacob:  Do they grow that in —

[00:55:01]  Michael Kaye:  They grow everything in California.

[00:55:05]  Simon Jacob:  Okay.

[00:55:05]  Michael Kaye:  Yeah, you can pretty much find almost anything there. There may be varietals — I don't know, like Pinotage, that's South African — that they don't have there, but maybe somebody's growing it. That's something that's of interest to me.

[00:55:21]  Also of interest to me is doing some skin-macerated wines. But my experience with a lot of skin-macerated wines is that they're all interesting, and only a few are actually also delicious. I feel like I haven't done enough research on finding which ones are that way and seeing if there's a pattern between different winemakers that leads to deliciousness. I tried something from Hungary last year that was phenomenal — just a phenomenal wine. But I tried it in Texas, and I wasn't able to get hold of the winemaker, so I don't know what they're doing that led to that. So while natural winemaking and skin-fermented winemaking are an interesting part of the wine world, I want to make sure it stays within the realm of yummy as well before I put that out.

[00:56:27]  Simon Jacob:  So your partnership with Rabbi Berkowitz started with that free ton of Zinfandel —

[00:56:35]  Michael Kaye:  It actually started before the free ton of Zinfandel, but —

[00:56:39]  Simon Jacob:  — now we've learned. How do the two of you divide the work, and where do you disagree the most?

[00:56:49]  Michael Kaye:  Aren't these great questions? [?]

[00:57:02]  Well, let me first address the first question. Dovber works with people all the time. He's a Chabad rabbi. He's got a huge community — kids, parents, the elderly, singles, married, all sorts of people. So he's always dealing with people. I think one of the things that he loves, and is really passionate about, is equipment. He's our equipment guy. It gives him a break from all that people management, and he gets to focus on equipment. He's kind of a known entity in the secondary market for used wine equipment in the United States. He's known as "the rabbi."

[00:57:47]  Simon Jacob:  Wow.

[00:57:47]  Michael Kaye:  People in Texas — you know, non-Jewish people — call him up: "Hey, Rabbi, we've got a bladder press that just came available. Would you be interested in this?" And he loves it.

[00:58:01]  Simon Jacob:  Does he buy for other people too?

[00:58:03]  Michael Kaye:  Sometimes he does. He buys on the side and then he resells.

[00:58:06]  Simon Jacob:  Okay.

[00:58:07]  Michael Kaye:  Just because in his research he'll come across a good deal, and we don't happen to need whatever the piece of equipment is, but he knows it's something good, and he'll get it and resell it. He just loves getting into the nitty-gritty of pieces of equipment, but also all the electrical sides of things. He can repair wiring, he can repair plugs, he can repair generators, he can fix the glycol chiller. He set up all the temperature-control systems in the winery. We have an area of the winery, for example, that's kept [audio gap] other parts of the space where we're aging wine at a different temperature. He set all that up. All the construction side of things, all the infrastructure — that's him, and he's passionate about it and really enjoys it. Which is great, because personally I'm not that interested in figuring out three-... prongs versus regular electricity, et cetera.

[00:59:13]  Simon Jacob:  Three-phase.

[00:59:13]  Michael Kaye:  Three-phase. Exactly. There you go — case in point.

[00:59:16]  Simon Jacob:  It's okay.

[00:59:17]  Michael Kaye:  Case in point. So that's something he really brings both expertise and passion to — both the equipment, making sure everything works and getting what we need to make the job easier and more efficient, and also negotiating it and getting us good prices, so that we can hopefully continue to avoid debt, which is something we've prided ourselves on.

[00:59:51]  The other thing: as I mentioned, he spends all of his time with people. So when he does a wine tasting, people love him, because he's such a people person. He's really good at making people feel included and really being focused on a person when they're asking questions about the wine. It's great. And then the last thing, which I think I might have mentioned previously, is that he's very patient. That balances out my maybe more aggressive "let's get this done, let's get it out, or it's not gonna work." He's a little more even-keeled, and so that's something.

[01:00:35]  [inaudible] I think the areas where we differ are: I am always pushing to do more and more, and he wants to go slower in terms of expanding the brand, expanding our offerings, expanding the size of our company. In the last year, I think we have come to a better shared vision for the company.

[01:01:04]  So one of the things we're really focusing on this year is expansion, both in terms of distribution and in terms of places where people can purchase the wine. Because a lot of times people will come across our wine at somebody's Seder or somebody's Shabbos meal — let's say they're visiting from the East Coast, seeing their kids in LA — and they come across my wine, and then they want to get it on the East Coast. Well, they can certainly order from us, and we can ship to them. But as much as we ship wine, and many people do buy over the internet, most people still go into a store. So one of the things we're working on is making it more available to people on the East Coast, for example. I think we're finally on the same page with that vision, and I'm hoping it's really going to be a banner year for us in terms of developing that and really broadening it.

[01:02:09]  And along those lines, I'll say two other things. We're in the process of raising capital for people to invest in the winery. If anybody has any interest or questions about that, they're welcome to contact me. They can find me at Invei.com and send me an email via Invei, or through you, or whomever.

[01:02:32]  The other thing is that I've realized, in the process of promoting the wine — and I mentioned this earlier — that we're offering wine experiences to people. So in addition to, say, flying to the East Coast and doing a wine tasting in a person's home for all their friends, which has now become another part of what we do as a winery, we also do private tastings in my home. I've had groups of people come, and I make a dinner for them, and we go through all the wines, and it's a great experience. I've done it in particular for recently married couples as part of their honeymoon. They'll often come to Northern California because they want to tour wineries, and they'll come and have a dinner by me. It's something I didn't anticipate would be part of my winemaking life, but it's something I really enjoy.

[01:03:27]  Simon Jacob:  Lastly, what are the varieties that you have? What do you have to offer as far as grapes right now?

[01:03:35]  Michael Kaye:  So what's currently bottled that people can purchase is Petit Verdot, Barbera, Gewürztraminer, Muscat Canelli, and the very tail end of our rosé — our Malbec rosé, which is probably our most popular wine. We're probably down to a couple of cases. So all of those are available, depending on where a person is. We sell in a lot of stores in Los Angeles and the Bay Area. We're in a few stores in New York and New Jersey. And we also ship nationally, around the country, through our website, Invei.com. So people can order things, and if they have questions, they can send an email. What we try to do is, if people order a case online, we waive the shipping, so that it costs the same as if they had bought it in a store.

[01:04:37]  Simon Jacob:  And it gets shipped to your doorstep.

[01:04:38]  Michael Kaye:  It gets shipped to your doorstep. Right.

[01:04:41]  Simon Jacob:  It's actually better than going to the store, because you don't have to schlep it home.

[01:04:43]  Michael Kaye:  Right.

[01:04:44]  Simon Jacob:  I love that idea.

[01:04:47]  Michael Kaye:  And you can put together a mixed case, however you want to do it. It's also nice that you can buy it as a surprise gift for a family member: "Hey, I got you a bottle of wine, Dad." That kind of thing.

[01:04:58]  Simon Jacob:  Very cool. One last question that I want to throw out there.

[01:05:02]  Michael Kaye:  Sure.

[01:05:02]  Simon Jacob:  If you could make one wine in Israel, where and what would it be?

[01:05:09]  Michael Kaye:  That's a great question.

[01:05:11]  Simon Jacob:  Because you've had some experience here.

[01:05:13]  Michael Kaye:  Yeah.

[01:05:14]  Simon Jacob:  And I can find people for Rabbi Berkowitz to take care of here in Israel. There are plenty of communities.

[01:05:26]  Michael Kaye:  [crosstalk] Well, that's a very good thing.

[01:05:35]  Simon Jacob:  But go ahead.

[01:05:35]  Michael Kaye:  Of course. I had an experience the other night. I was swimming in the pool at the Ramada Hotel here in Jerusalem, and I was in the changing room afterwards, and this man comes over and starts shouting at me in Hebrew. My Hebrew is okay, but it's pretty limited, so I just asked him if he spoke English. He switched to English, and it turns out he was just praising my swimming technique. He was like, "You're a fantastic swimmer! Where did you learn?" Blah, blah, blah. And then, as so many Israelis have done at so many moments of my life, he said, "And when are you moving here?"

[01:06:16]  Simon Jacob:  Yep.

[01:06:17]  Michael Kaye:  Right? Nobody does that when you go to Hawaii. But when you come to Israel: "When are you moving here? We want you here."

[01:06:24]  You know, when you asked me that question, the first thing that came to mind is that I'd love to do something in the desert. I'm always fascinated by places like Yatir. I just think that's an interesting place to do vineyards. I think probably also someplace up near Zichron Yaakov, just because of the terroir, the temperature, that kind of thing — I think it's probably great for the [?].

[01:06:52]  Simon Jacob:  Very California.

[01:06:52]  Michael Kaye:  Yeah, very California. These are places I'm more familiar with how to navigate. I'm sure there are many parts of the country where I could learn different parameters of the vineyard and the winemaking. People do so many different things here, in so many different ways. They're so creative. I'm thinking of Tzora [?] and their ice wine — they make it with Gewürztraminer that they freeze and then press. Who would think a phenomenal ice wine would come out of Israel? It does.

[01:07:28]  So, like I said, I'm interested in the desert. I'd be interested in Zichron Yaakov. But ultimately, where — I'm not sure. I'd like to look further into what is not being offered in Israel. Like I mentioned, the Montepulciano — I don't know if anybody's making that here.

[01:07:52]  Simon Jacob:  I don't think so.

[01:07:53]  Michael Kaye:  And there are probably a ton of varietals that are less commonly made here that have enormous potential, especially to add to what Israel puts out in the world. So those are things that interest me. I mean, yes, everybody — well, not everybody, but most people — love a Cabernet. I'd be happy to make a Cabernet here. I have; I've worked with Amichai on that. But what interests me most is exposing people to wines they haven't had the chance to experience.

[01:08:27]  Simon Jacob:  Thank you. Thank you very much for being here.

[01:08:30]  Michael Kaye:  Thank you very much for having me.

[01:08:31]  Simon Jacob:  Always good to see you.

[01:08:32]  Michael Kaye:  Always good to spend time with you.

[01:08:34]  Simon Jacob:  Pleasure. Shalom u'vracha.

Closing

[01:08:46]  Simon Jacob:  This is Simon Jacob again, your host of today's episode of The Kosher Terroir. Please subscribe via your podcast provider to be informed of our new episodes as they are released. If you're new to The Kosher Terroir, please check out our many past episodes. [Recording ends at 01:09:13.]