Welcome

[00:08] Welcome to The Kosher Terroir. I’m Simon Jacob, your host for this episode from Jerusalem. Before we start, wherever you are, please take a moment to pray for the safe return home of all of our soldiers. If you’re driving, in your car, keep your eyes on the road. If you’re home, pour yourself a glass of wonderful kosher wine, sit back, and spend a little time with me.

Cold Open: Pepys at the Royal Oak, 1663

[00:36] London. A Friday in April. Sixteen sixty-three.

[00:45] A young official from the Navy Office finishes his business at the Exchange, and walks with two colleagues to a tavern on Lombard Street called the Royal Oak. Nothing special about that afternoon. They sit down. They order wine.

[01:06] That night he goes home and does what he does every night of his life. He writes in his diary. And somewhere between the gossip and the business of the day, he writes this:

[01:20] “…and here drank a sort of French wine, called Ho Bryan, that hath a good and most peculiar taste that I never met with.”

[01:35] The young man was Samuel Pepys. And “Ho Bryan” was his English ear for Haut-Brion — one estate, on a patch of gravel just outside the city of Bordeaux.

[01:50] As far as anyone has found, that sentence is the first time somebody wrote down what a wine tasted like and named it for a land it came from.

[02:04] Listen to what he didn’t say. He didn’t say strong. He didn’t say cheap, or sweet, or that it survived the crossing. He said particular. A taste he had never met.

[02:22] Three hundred and sixty years later, we are still chasing that word.

[02:27] I’ve chased it my whole life at the table. And for most of that life I carried a belief I never stopped to question — the belief almost everyone in the wine world seems to share.

[02:42] That the great wines are behind us.

[02:46] That somewhere back there — in a cellar in Burgundy, in a château in Bordeaux, in a vintage our grandparents toasted — there were bottles so magnificent that nothing made today can touch them.

[03:03] This series is about whether that’s true.

[03:08] And I’ll warn you now. The answer isn’t the one either side of that argument expects.

[03:15] This is The Kosher Terroir. And this is The Great Wine Illusion.

Introduction

[03:22] Let me tell you where this started. It started with something I noticed about my memory.

[03:29] I remember wines getting better. Not a little. Noticeably. Through the seventies, the eighties, and the nineties — bottle by bottle, year by year — the wine on my table got cleaner. Riper. Deeper. And more reliable. In the kosher world the change was so dramatic it’s almost funny to remember where we started. But it wasn’t only kosher wine. It was everything.

[04:01] And yet, all around me, I kept hearing the opposite story. The collector who lowers his voice when he says the word pre-war. The auction catalogue with the numbers that make you sit down. The old-timer who tells you, very kindly, that you missed the real thing.

[04:24] Both of those can’t be right. Either the wines of yesterday were the greatest ever made — or my memory has been lying to me.

[04:35] So I went looking. And what I found surprised me.

[04:40] The people who made legendary wines were real. They were serious. Some of them were chasing quality centuries before anyone had a thermometer. That part of the legend is true.

[04:56] But for nearly a hundred years, the most widely planted grape in all of France was one most of you have never heard of — grown for one reason, and that reason was quantity. The France of the legends was an island. All around it was an ocean.

[05:17] And one of the wines most often called the greatest red of the twentieth century would be flagged today by a modern cellar’s laboratory. Not because it was bad. Because by today’s standards, it was technically flawed. People still pay a small fortune for a bottle. If the bottle is even real.

[05:40] So here is what I’ve come to believe. I want to say it carefully, because it isn’t the easy version.

[05:49] Great wine is old. Very old. What’s new is great wine on purpose. Great wine you can make again next year. Great wine that doesn’t depend on one slope, one family and one lucky summer. And — this is where it becomes our story — great wine on a kosher table, from places where fifty years ago nobody would have dreamed of planting a fine-wine vineyard.

[06:23] That’s the illusion I want to look at. Not that the old wines were bad. That their greatness was the same thing as ours.

[06:34] We’re going to take this in three episodes. Each one asks its own question, and each one stands on its own. But they’re built to be heard together.

[06:45] Tonight is the history. When did wine become great? Who was chasing it, and why? And how close did they get without a single one of the tools we take for granted?

[07:00] Next time, the science. A cellar here in Israel whose very first harvest turned to vinegar — and how we got from there to vineyards that tell the winemaker when they’re thirsty. And a winemaker I admire enormously, who takes the grapes from one vineyard and ferments them in thirteen different ways — to tell you the truth about a single hillside.

[07:28] And in the third episode, the hardest question of all. How much of what we taste is in the glass — and how much is in the story we were told before the cork came out? For that one I sat down with a couple who have seen this from every side. One of them spent years judging the world’s wines for a living. Then he went and made his own — and watched the judges score it.

[07:59] So, tonight. Here’s the map. A duke who fired a grape — and why, six hundred years later, his decision still shapes what’s in your glass.

[08:11] A London tavern, and a family who understood before anyone else that a wine with a name is worth more than a wine without one. And the price list that has ranked Bordeaux’s most famous estates ever since.

[08:28] An ocean of ordinary wine, and the grape that filled it.

[08:34] And two of the most celebrated bottles of the twentieth century. One came from vines that were dying. And the other should have been a disaster.

[08:44] Then we’ll ask who these people really were — the ones who chased greatness when all the odds were against them — and what they couldn’t do, however hard they tried.

[08:57] And at the very end, we’ll go back to that duke. Because his house is still standing. And I’ll tell you what they’re pouring there today. I think it’ll make you smile.

[09:10] Before we begin, I want to give you a question to carry. I’ll ask it of the history tonight. I’ll ask it of every guest in this series. And at the very end of the episode of the third episode, I’ll answer it myself.

[09:29] Think of the greatest wine you’ve ever had. Not the most expensive. The one that stopped you.

[09:38] Now imagine it were made again — exactly as it was — and poured for you tonight. Would it still astonish you?

[09:48] Hold on to your answer. You may find it changes.

[09:55] Let’s start where the deliberate pursuit of quality begins: a decree, a duke, and a grape that was sentenced to exile.

Chapter 1 — The Duke Who Fired a Grape

[10:04] In the summer of thirteen ninety-five, the Duke of Burgundy put his name to an order about a grape.

[10:12] Not about a war. Not a tax. Not a marriage, though he was very good at arranging those. A grape.

[10:21] He called it — and I’m translating from the old French — a very bad and disloyal plant. He said its wine was full of very great and horrible harshness. And he ordered it torn out of his lands.

[10:38] The duke was Philip. History calls him Philip the Bold. And to understand why a prince of France would spend his ink on a vine, you have to know what kind of man he was, and what kind of place he ruled.

[10:56] Philip was royalty. The son of the king of France, the brother of another, and the uncle of a third. He was given Burgundy in his twenties, and he ran it like what it was: his. Its land, its money, its reputation — all of it reflected on him.

[11:21] And by his time, Burgundy’s reputation was its wine.

[11:26] The reputation didn’t begin with dukes. It began with monks.

[11:32] Around the year eleven hundred, a group of monks founded a monastery in Cîteaux, south of Dijon. These were the Cistercians. They worked the land with their own hands, they kept records, and they had something no ordinary farmer has. They had centuries. A monastery doesn’t die. The same community could watch the same slope, harvest after harvest, for generations.

[12:03] And slowly they noticed what anyone who tends vines eventually notices. This row isn’t that row. The wine from the top of the hill isn’t the wine from the bottom. One small patch, year after year, gives you something the patch next to it never will.

[12:24] By thirteen thirty-six, the monks had put a wall around their most important vineyard. And It’s still there. Clos de Vougeot.

[12:35] A wall around a vineyard is a statement. It says: this ground is different. Remember where it ends.

[12:44] So by Philip’s day, the grape that carried Burgundy’s name was the one we now call Pinot Noir. Back then it went by Noirien. It made the wine the duke sent as gifts to popes and kings.

[13:01] And it was a difficult grape. It still is. Thin-skinned. Fussy. Prone to rot. Stingy. Pinot Noir does not give you a lot of wine, and it makes you work for what it does give.

[13:18] Then, in the fourteenth century, something new appeared in the vineyard. A grape named after a hamlet in the Côte d’Or called Gamay.

[13:32] Gamay was everything Pinot wasn’t. It ripened about two weeks earlier. It was easy to grow. And it gave wine — lots of wine. In hard times, with fewer hands to work the land, it must have looked like a gift.

[13:50] So growers did what any of us would do. They planted it. Some of them pulled out the Pinot to make room.

[14:00] And it wasn’t only the grape. Philip’s ordinance goes on, and it gets specific. Growers were feeding their vines with manure, with animal horns, with rotten fruit and worse — anything to push the vines to give more. And when there still wasn’t enough, some of them were adding hot water to the must to stretch it. The duke wrote that it made the wine stink.

[14:31] If you’ve ever tasted a wine from vines pushed for yield, you know he wasn’t exaggerating as much as it sounds. A vine has only so much to give. Spread it over twice the fruit, and every grape gets half.

[14:49] So Philip drew a line. Gamay out, within a month. No more feeding the vines for volume. No more water in the vat.

[15:00] Now, I want to be fair to the duke, and fair to his growers. Because this is not a simple story about a wise prince who loved quality.

[15:12] Philip owned close to two hundred hectares of vines himself. And Burgundy was locked in a rivalry with Paris over whose wines were better, and the king in Paris was Philip’s own nephew. A flood of cheap Burgundy was bad for prices, bad for prestige, and bad for the duke.

[15:37] And the people of Burgundy hated it. The citizens of Dijon complained so loudly that Philip threw their mayor in prison and installed his own. Growers got poorer. Yields fell. The edict saved the region’s reputation and made a lot of families hungrier.

[15:57] But here’s what I can’t get past. It worked.

[16:02] Six hundred years later, almost every red wine from the heart of Burgundy is Pinot Noir. Gamay went south, to Beaujolais, where it found a home and, in time, real dignity. And there’s a lovely irony still sitting in the Côte d’Or today. In the village of Saint-Aubin there’s a premier cru vineyard called Sur Gamay. You can make wine there. But it can’t contain a drop of Gamay.

[16:35] One more twist, and then I’ll leave the duke alone for a while. Modern DNA testing has worked out Gamay’s parent. One of them is Pinot Noir.

[16:49] The disloyal plant was family all along.

[16:54] So, the first great quality rule in European wine was a choice: less wine, from the right grape, on the right ground, made honestly. And it was a choice made by a man with every selfish reason to make it.

[17:12] Hold on to that. Because it’s going to come back in every chapter of this episode. The people who chased greatness were rarely saints. They were usually protecting a name. Often their own. But Philip wasn’t first.

[17:32] Some of you will remember, a few months ago, when we went into the Temple’s spice loft looking for the wine inside the incense. I told you then that the wine poured on the altar had its own specification in the Mishnah. No sweet wine. No smoked wine. No cooked wine.

[17:55] What I didn’t tell you was what comes just before that list. Because it might be the most remarkable paragraph about wine quality in the ancient world.

[18:06] It’s in the Mishnah, tractate Menachot, chapter eight. And it opens with a question: from where did they bring the wine?

[18:17] And then it does something I find astonishing. It ranks the vineyards.

[18:23] First place goes to two places called Keruchim and Atulim. And the Mishnah doesn’t just say they’re first. It uses the Greek word. Alpha. Keruchim and Atulim are the alpha of wine. Then, second to them, Beit Rimah and Beit Lavan, in the hill country. And Kfar Signa, down in the valley.

[18:53] Listen to that again with the ears of a wine person. Named places. A first rank and a second rank. Hill sites and valley sites, called out separately.

[19:06] That’s a classification. Written down in the Land of Israel around eighteen hundred years ago.

[19:14] And then the Mishnah says something that I think every kosher wine drinker should hear. All the land was valid. Wine from anywhere in the country could go on the altar. But this is where they brought it from.

[19:32] So what was permitted and what was chosen were two different questions. The altar didn’t need the best wine to be kosher. It wanted the best wine because it was the altar.

[19:45] And then come the farming rules. Don’t bring wine from a vineyard that was manured. Don’t bring wine from a vineyard that was irrigated. Don’t bring wine from a vineyard with grain sown between the rows. If you did bring it, it’s still valid. But it’s not what you bring.

[20:11] The commentators explain why. A field that depends on manure may not get all it needs, and its fruit comes out weak; and manure can spoil the taste. The vines they wanted grew low to the ground, not high up in vineyards that were worked, hoed twice a year.

[20:33] And the next Mishnah moves into the cellar. The wine was kept in small barrels, not big casks. The barrels weren’t filled to the top, so the wine’s aroma could gather. And when they drew the wine, they didn’t take it from the top, where the film had formed, or from the bottom, where the lees had settled. They took it from the middle third.

[21:00] And a Temple official tested it, tapping the wine with a reed.

[21:05] Ranked sites. No manure. No irrigation. No crops crowding the vines. Small vessels, headspace for aroma, and only the heart of the barrel.

[21:19] Twelve hundred years before a duke in Burgundy banned manure, the Mishnah was already choosing less wine, from the right ground, handled with care.

[21:31] I’m not suggesting Philip ever read the Mishnah. I’m sure he didn’t. I’m suggesting something more interesting. Anyone who cares about wine seriously enough, for long enough, arrives at the same place. Choose the ground. Don’t force the vines, and take only the best part.

[21:54] The monks of Cîteaux got there by watching. The duke got there by decree. Our Sages got there because the wine was going to the altar, and the altar deserved the best.

[22:09] And hold on to one of those rules, because it comes back later in this series. No irrigation. The Mishnah prefers unwatered vines. In the twentieth century, France would write the same rule into its wine law. And in the twentieth century, Israel would do exactly the opposite and change the world of wine with a single drop of water. That’s the story for the next episode.

[22:41] So let’s take stock. What could these people actually do?

[22:48] They could choose the place. They could choose the grape. They could refuse to push the vines, they could keep the wine in the right vessel and take only the best of it.

[23:03] What they couldn’t choose was the summer.

[23:06] The duke could tear out every Gamay vine in Burgundy, and a cold, wet September would still ruin his Pinot. The Temple could draw from the alpha vineyards, and a hard year would still be a hard year. They had judgment. They had discipline. They had no control over the weather, and no way to measure what was happening inside of that.

[23:35] That was the shape of greatness before science. Not luck exactly. Judgment, waiting on luck.

[23:44] One last thing about Philip the Bold. He didn’t only rule Burgundy. He lived there. And one of his homes, a château in a small wine village in the south of Côte d’Or, is still standing today. It still makes wine.

[24:03] But I’m not going to tell you what it makes yet. Keep it in the back of your mind. We’ll come back to the duke’s house at the end of the episode.

[24:13] Burgundy taught the world to choose the ground. Two hundred and fifty years later, in a different corner of France, a family figured out something Burgundy hadn’t quite put into words. That a wine with a name could be sold for more than a wine without one.

[24:31] To find them, we’re going back to where we started tonight. A tavern on Lombard Street, and a man with a diary.

Chapter 2 — Ho Bryan

[24:40] Let’s go back to the Royal Oak, on Lombard Street, and Samuel Pepys with his glass.

[24:49] I want you to notice something about that diary entry that’s easy to miss. Pepys didn’t write “I drank a claret.” He didn’t write “I drank a wine from Bordeaux.” He wrote down a name. Ho Bryan. That’s what was new.

[25:08] For centuries, England had been Bordeaux’s best customer. But what England bought was mostly a light, pale red the English called clairet — claret. It came by the barrel, it was drunk young, and it was sold by region, not by property. Nobody asked whose vineyard it came from. You asked whether it was this year’s wine, and whether it had turned.

[25:37] Wine was a commodity. And a commodity doesn’t have a name.

[25:42] The family that changed that was called Pontac.

[25:45] They had held the land in Haut-Brion since the fifteen twenties, when a Jean de Pontac married into it — the vineyard came as part of his bride’s dowry. By the sixteen hundreds, the estate belonged to Arnaud de Pontac, the third of that name, and the president of the Bordeaux parliament. A powerful man, with a very particular piece of ground.

[26:16] And Arnaud did two things that, put together, invented the luxury wine business.

[26:22] The first was in the cellar. Historians credit the Pontacs with a new kind of red — the English came to call it the new French claret. Stronger. Darker. Kept in barrels that were topped up as the wine evaporated, so air couldn’t spoil it. Aged longer before it was sold. A wine built to last, from a region whose wines mostly didn’t.

[26:55] I’ll add one honest footnote: some historians now argue that this style really took over a little later than the legend says. But everyone agrees on the second thing that Arnaud did. And the second thing is the one that changed the world.

[27:16] He sold the wine under the estate’s name.

[27:20] When King Charles II came home to England in sixteen sixty, his cellar books record bottles of Hobriono, served at the royal table. Three years later, Pepys is drinking it in a tavern. And in sixteen sixty-six, just after the Great Fire burned through London, Arnaud sends his son across the Channel — with a French chef — to open a tavern of their own.

[27:52] They hung a portrait of the father over the door. And the place became known as Pontack’s Head. And it became one of the most fashionable addresses in London. Writers dined there. Members of the Royal Society met there.

[28:08] And the wine? According to the château’s own history, it sold there for seven shillings a bottle. Ordinary wine was going for two.

[28:20] There’s a verse in Kohelet that I couldn’t stop thinking about while I read this story. Tov shem mi-shemen tov. A good name is better than fine oil.

[28:33] Kohelet meant something much deeper than marketing. But Arnaud de Pontac understood the commercial version of it perfectly. A good name was better than a good wine. Because a good name could cross the sea, sit on a tavern sign, and command three and a half times the price.

[28:56] Now, here’s where that story gets interesting. And it fits this series almost too well.

[29:04] In May of sixteen seventy-seven, the English philosopher John Locke was travelling through France. He rode out of Bordeaux to see for himself the vineyard everyone in London was talking about. And he wrote down what he found.

[29:24] He said the vineyard sat on a little rise of ground, open to the west. And then he wrote that the soil was nothing but pure white sand, mixed with a little gravel. One would imagine, he said, it was scarce fit to bear anything.

[29:43] Then he wrote down what the merchants told him. That there was such a particularity in that soil, that the vineyard right next door — with only a ditch between them, and soil that looked exactly the same — made wine that was by no means as good.

[30:04] Particularity. Fourteen years after Pepys tasted something particular, Locke is standing in the vineyard, being told it’s the ground that makes it. One side of a ditch, and not the other. That’s terroir, three hundred and fifty years ago, in an English philosopher’s notebook.

[30:30] But Locke wrote something else in that journal.

[30:33] He estimated how much wine that vineyard could actually produce in a year. And then he noted, rather dryly, that the owner “makes the grapes do a double shift” to make twice as much.

[30:47] A wine historian named Charlie Leary has studied that line closely. His reading is that Pontac was selling roughly double what the Haut-Brion vineyard could grow, very likely by adding wine from another of the family’s estates, made the same way and sold under the same famous name. And the château’s own archivist has said that, at the height of the English demand, that’s possible.

[31:22] Now, I want to be careful. That’s one reading of one line in the seventeenth century diary, and wine blending under a house name was hardly a crime in sixteen seventy-seven. But think about what it means for our story.

[31:43] The very first time a wine became famous by name, the name was already carrying more wine than the ground could give.

[31:53] The legend and the liquid parted ways on day one.

[31:57] Keep that in mind, because you’re going to hear it again — in this episode, and in a much bigger way in the third episode of the series.

[32:08] Pontack’s idea spread. Over the next hundred years, other Bordeaux estates learned the same lesson: make a wine that can age, put your name on it, and sell it to people who can pay. By the early seventeen hundreds, the London papers were advertising “new French Obrion claret” at around sixty pounds a tun — a tun being a very big cask. Ordinarily Bordeaux was going for eighteen.

[32:43] The name now had a price. And sooner or later, somebody was going to write the prices down.

[32:51] That somebody turned out to be a committee of wine brokers, in eighteen fifty-five.

[32:58] France was preparing a great world’s fair in Paris, the Exposition Universelle, and the emperor, Napoleon III, wanted France’s best produce on display. The Bordeaux Chamber of Commerce wanted a list of the region’s finest wines to show the world. So they asked the people who would know: the brokers — the middlemen who spent their lives buying and selling Bordeaux.

[33:28] And the brokers did what brokers do. They ranked the wines by price.

[33:35] Not by tasting them at the fair. Not by visiting vineyards. By what each château’s wine had been selling for. Their list is dated the eighteenth of April, eighteen fifty-five. Five tiers, first growth to fifth. At the very top, four names. Three of them from Médoc. And one from the gravel just outside the city — the only estate from outside Médoc on the whole red list.

[34:06] Haut-Brion. Ho Bryan. Still there, nearly two hundred years after the Pontacs hung a portrait over a tavern door.

[34:19] Now, to be fair to the brokers, a price list isn’t a foolish way to rank wine. A price is the verdict of thousands of buyers over many years. It’s a reputation, turned into a number.

[34:34] But notice what happened next. The list froze.

[34:38] Vineyards changed hands. Owners came and went. Some estates got better, some got worse. And the ranking from eighteen fifty-five barely moved. In more than a hundred and seventy years, exactly one château has been promoted. Mouton, ranked second in eighteen fifty-five, and promoted to first growth in nineteen seventy-three by government decree — after its owner spent half a century campaigning for it.

[35:16] When the promotion finally came, the château put a new motto on its label. Premier je suis, second je fus, Mouton ne change. First I am. Second I was. Mouton does not change.

[35:32] And in other words: the wine didn’t change; the ranking did. Sit with that for a moment.

[35:39] So here is the strange inheritance of Bordeaux. France’s most famous ranking of wine quality, a list that still sets the prices today, was born as a price list. It measures reputation. And reputation, as Pontac proved two centuries earlier, can carry more than the ground gives.

[36:08] And now let me bring this to our table. Because here is something that would have astonished the brokers of eighteen fifty-five.

[36:17] That list has kosher wine on it now.

[36:21] Not just a kosher wine from the same region. Kosher wines from the ranked châteaux themselves. One of the most respected second growths in Saint-Julien, Léoville Poyferré, has been making a kosher cuvée since the nineteen ninety-nine vintage. Other classified châteaux have done the same, with Royal Wine and its team in Bordeaux. And one of the most famous second growths of all — Cos d’Estournel, the one with the pagoda towers — is making its very first kosher cuvée, from the twenty twenty-five vintage.

[37:05] Adam Montefiore tells a story about this that I love. He was invited to a Shabbat meal in Paris, and his host opened a bottle of Léoville Poyferré. He looked at the label, and it looked exactly like the regular wine. Same name. Same design. Same second growth. Only when he put his glasses on and looked closely at the capsule did he see it was a kosher cuvée.

[37:40] Think about what that means, after everything we’ve just heard. For three hundred and fifty years, the name on a Bordeaux label has carried the weight. And today, a kosher table can pour a wine that carries exactly that name — and the only way to tell is the capsule.

[38:05] I’ll be honest with you, because this series demands it. A kosher cuvée is usually a separate, smaller production — a selection of the château’s vats, made under supervision. One celebrated Saint-Émilion estate once explained that its regular wine came from forty vats and its kosher wine from two. So the name is the same, but it isn’t always the identical blend. The people who know these wines say the kosher cuvée can be every bit as good, and that it shows the château’s character. But the label alone won’t tell you that. Only the glass will.

[38:56] Which, if you think about it, is exactly the question of this whole series.

[39:03] So let’s take stock again. Burgundy taught the world to choose the ground. Bordeaux taught the world to sell the name. Both were real achievements. And both, in their way, were about a handful of special places: a walled vineyard, a rise of white sand and gravel, four names at the top of a list.

[39:32] But while those names were fetching seven shillings a bottle, and later, many times that, what was everybody else drinking?

[39:41] Because the great wines of France were never the most of France. Not even close. And the story of what the rest of the country was pouring is the one the legends leave out.

Chapter 3 — An Ocean of Ordinary Wine

[39:55] I’ll tell you something about how this series began.

[39:59] When I first sat down with this idea, I had a number in my head. I was sure that in the eighteen hundreds, something like eighty percent of the vines in France were one single grape. A grape grown for nothing but volume.

[40:18] I was wrong about that number. Let me say that plainly, because if I’m going to ask you to question the legend, I’d better question my own.

[40:31] But I was right about the picture. And the picture is the part of French wine history the legends leave out. Let’s start with the train.

[40:42] In the middle of the nineteenth century, the railroad reached the south of France — into the Midi, Languedoc, the warm flat country between the mountains and the Mediterranean. And suddenly, a barrel of wine from the south could reach Paris, and the factory towns of the north, quickly and cheaply.

[41:03] Think about what that meant. Millions of workers in the cities, doing hard physical work, who wanted wine with their bread every day. Not great wine. Not wine to lay down. Just wine. A lot of it, and cheap. The Midi answered.

[41:24] In one single area of Languedoc, in about twenty years, growers planted more vineyard than the entire Bordeaux region has today. And most of it was planted with one grape. The name is Aramon.

[41:41] I’d be surprised if many of you have ever had a glass of it. Aramon makes a pale, light red, low in alcohol and colour. What it does better than almost any other grape is produce. Pushed on rich, flat ground, it gives enormous yields — several times what a serious vineyard would ever allow itself. The wine had a nickname in France: petit rouge. The little red. The workers’ wine.

[42:14] And then the whole thing nearly died.

[42:18] In eighteen sixty-three, a tiny insect was recorded in a French vineyard for the first time. In Languedoc, as it happens. Phylloxera. It feeds on the roots of the vine, and the European vine has no defence against it. Over the following decades it marched across France, and across most of Europe, and destroyed vineyard after vineyard.

[42:45] The cure, when it came, was to graft European vines onto the roots of American vines, which could live with the insect. Every great vineyard you’ve ever heard of was rebuilt this way. Hold on to that — it matters in the next chapter.

[43:05] But while the vines were dying, France still wanted its daily wine. So people found other ways to make it. Wine from dried raisins. Wine stretched with sugar and water. And wine from across the sea.

[43:24] France’s colony in Algeria was turned into a vineyard almost overnight. In eighteen seventy-two, it had about seventeen thousand hectares of vines. By eighteen ninety, more than a hundred and ten thousand. Dark, strong Algerian wine was shipped north and blended with the pale reds of the Midi to give them colour and alcohol.

[43:54] When the Midi replanted after phylloxera, it went back to Aramon, and it planted even more. Fortunes were made. The town of Béziers called itself the wine capital of the world. Rich growers built mansions in the plain that the locals nicknamed after the grape that had paid for them.

[44:17] By the early twentieth century, the four departments of Languedoc-Roussillon were making around forty percent of all the wine in France. In the first half of the century, close to forty-five. And of course, it all collapsed.

[44:34] Too much wine. Too much of it faked. Prices fell through the floor. In nineteen hundred and seven, the winegrowers of the Midi rose up — huge demonstrations, town halls resigning, and in the end the government in Paris sent in the army.

[44:56] Out of that crisis, and others like it, France began to write rules. Laws against fraud. Laws defining where a wine could say it came from. And eventually, in the nineteen thirties, a system of appellations — the AOC — with a national body to police it.

[45:21] Think about where those rules came from. The famous appellation system wasn’t only built to celebrate the great sites. It was built as a dam. Against the flood of ordinary wine. And the flood didn’t stop.

[45:39] In nineteen fifty-eight, France carried out a complete survey of its vineyards. It counted about one point three six million hectares of vines. Aramon alone covered around a hundred and fifty thousand. Carignan, another workhorse of the south, around a hundred and seventy thousand. Put the four great bulk grapes of the time together, and they covered more than thirty percent of France.

[46:10] And the grapes the whole world now thinks of as French — Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Chardonnay, and the other varieties that travelled the globe? In nineteen fifty-eight, they were all of about three percent.

[46:28] As late as the nineteen seventies, the Languedoc was at its largest ever — four hundred and thirty thousand hectares, thirty million hectolitres of wine a year, most of it table wine. And around nineteen seventy, three grapes — Aramon, Carignan and Cinsault — made up three quarters of the region’s vineyards.

[46:58] Nineteen seventy. Not the Middle Ages. Well within the middle of my lifetime.

[47:05] So when someone tells you that French wine used to be better, I want you to ask one gentle question. Which French wine?

[47:17] Because for most of the last two hundred years, the wine most French people actually drank was this. Pale, thin, cheap, made by the vatful and drunk by the jug. The legends were real. But they were islands. Actually, tiny islands, in an ocean of ordinary wine.

[47:44] Now let me bring this home. Because the Land of Israel had its own little ocean. And it was filled with the very same grapes.

[47:51] When the first Jewish farmers of the new villages — Rishon LeZion, Zichron Ya’akov — planted their first experimental vineyards in eighteen eighty-two and eighteen eighty-three, the cuttings came largely from the agricultural school at Mikveh Israel. And what did they plant? Grapes from the south of France. Alicante. Cinsault. And Mourvèdre. And a grape the local growers called Corignan.

[48:23] Carignan. The same workhorse that was filling the Midi.

[48:30] Then the Baron arrived. Baron Edmond de Rothschild, the great patron of those villages, came to the land for the first time in eighteen eighty-seven. And remember, his family owned Château Lafite. One of the four names at the top of the eighteen fifty-five price list.

[48:54] The Baron wanted Bordeaux here. He insisted on Bordeaux grapes — Cabernet Franc, Cabernet Sauvignon, Malbec. He built enormous cellars at Rishon and Zichron. Adam Montefiore has worked out that those two cellars together cost the Baron about eight million francs. His father had bought Lafite itself, a generation earlier, for four.

[49:22] Think about that. A man who owned one of the greatest wines on earth spent nearly three times its price trying to plant greatness in the Land of Israel.

[49:35] And for the better part of a century… the market didn’t want it.

[49:40] What the market wanted was sacramental wine, and inexpensive wine. The Mediterranean grapes won the argument. By the nineteen forties, Carignan was a fifth of the country’s wine grapes. By the sixties, more than a third. Montefiore records that at one stage it reached more than half. In the nineteen fifties, most of the wine drunk here was sweet, and drunk for religious reasons. The country’s biggest wine export was a sweet kiddush wine.

[50:20] I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to sneer at that, and I’m not going to.

[50:28] That sweet wine from Rishon and Zichron went out to the world with what Montefiore calls a holy purpose: so that Jews in faraway communities could make kiddush. Before the State, the Rothschild cellars were already selling through offices in Warsaw, Vienna, Berlin, and London, and by nineteen hundred in New York. There were Shabbat tables in a lot of places where that bottle was the only kosher wine there was.

[51:00] The ocean of ordinary wine wasn’t worthless. On our tables, it was holy work. It just wasn’t great wine. And nobody pretended it was.

[51:11] And here’s the turn I’ve been waiting for this whole chapter.

[51:15] The Midi tore out its Aramon. After hard frosts in nineteen fifty-six and nineteen sixty-three hit it especially badly, and as the market for table wine collapsed, grower after grower pulled it up. Israel pulled out much of its Carignan too, as the country went looking for Cabernet and quality.

[51:40] But not all of it. A few old vines survived. Low, bush-trained vines, decades old, in the little valleys around Zichron Ya’akov, near the village named for the Baron’s own grandfather, Meir Shefaya.

[51:57] And in the early two thousands, some winemakers here looked at those old vines and saw something nobody had bothered to see before. They cut the yields drastically. They picked individual plots. They made Carignan as if it mattered. And it did.

[52:19] Today, old-vine Carignan is one of the proudest wines this country makes. Carmel has been bottling an old-vine Carignan from the vineyards around Zichron since two thousand and four — from the same slopes that once made sacramental wine for the world. And some of the most exciting small wineries in Israel, kosher wineries, now treat Carignan as a jewel rather than a workhorse. Regulars know I have a soft spot for this grape. Now you know why.

[52:56] And in Languedoc, the same thing is happening with Aramon. A handful of growers with very old vines, working at tiny yields, are making Aramon worth talking about.

[53:13] So here’s what the ocean teaches us. And it’s the lesson of the duke, and of the Mishnah, said again in a different accent.

[53:22] The grape was never really the villain. Aramon wasn’t. Carignan certainly wasn’t. The villain was the intention. Wine made to be more is one thing. Wine made to be better is another. Push any vine for volume and it gives you volume. Hold it back, choose the ground, pick the old plots, and the same vine can surprise you.

[53:52] The great wines of the past weren’t great because their grapes were magic. They were great because somebody, on some small piece of ground, chose to make less.

[54:06] Which brings us to the islands themselves. The famous few. The bottles the legends are made of.

[54:14] We’ve talked about who chased greatness. Now I want to ask the harder question. When they caught it — how great was it, really?

[54:27] I’ve chosen two bottles to answer that. Two of the most celebrated wines of the twentieth century. One was made from vines that were dying. The other was made in a heatwave, and by every rule of the cellar, it should have been a disaster.

Chapter 4 — Accidents of Nature

[54:46] So far tonight we’ve talked about the people who chased greatness. A duke. A family of merchants. And the ocean of ordinary wine all around them.

[54:58] Now I want to look at the greatness itself. The bottles the legends are made of.

[55:04] And I want to be fair about this, because these are not just famous wines. To the people who’ve been lucky enough to drink them, these are some of the most moving wines ever made. I’m not here to knock them down. I’m here to ask a question about them that almost nobody asks. Why were they great?

[55:25] The first bottle comes from Burgundy. From one tiny vineyard — under two hectares, about four and a half acres — in the village of Vosne-Romanée. It’s called Romanée-Conti. And if there’s one name in all of wine that makes collectors lower their voices, it’s that one.

[55:49] Remember, in the last chapter, the insects that destroyed the vineyards in France? And the cure — grafting European vines onto American roots? By the end of the nineteenth century almost every great vineyard in France had been torn out and replanted that way. Almost every one.

[56:11] The owners of Romanée-Conti refused. For decades they fought the insect with chemicals injected into the soil, so they could keep their old vines on their own roots. The original vines. The ones that had made the legend.

[56:29] And it worked, for a while. But it was a fight they were slowly losing. The vines grew tired. And then came the Second World War, and the chemicals they needed became almost impossible to get.

[56:43] By nineteen forty-five, those old vines were dying.

[56:48] The harvest that year was tiny. One account puts it at around a tenth of what the vineyards give today. From the whole Romanée-Conti, they made about six hundred bottles.

[57:03] And then, after that harvest, they pulled the vines out. Every one. The vineyard was left bare, replanted on grafted roots in nineteen forty-seven, and for six years, there was no Romanée-Conti at all. The next vintage didn’t come until nineteen fifty-two.

[57:26] So think about what nineteen forty-five Romanée-Conti is.

[57:33] It’s the last wine from the last ungrafted vines of the most famous vineyard in Burgundy. It’s the year the war ended. It’s six hundred bottles from vines so weak they could barely carry fruit — and when a vine carries almost nothing, that little it does carry can be extraordinarily concentrated.

[57:58] In twenty eighteen, at auction, a single bottle sold for more than a half a million dollars.

[58:07] Now let me ask the question the series exists to ask.

[58:11] Was it great because of the vines? Because of that suffering, that tiny crop, that concentration?

[58:22] Or was it because it was the last? Because it was the victory vintage? Because there were only six hundred, and now far, far fewer bottles?

[58:37] I honestly don’t know. Very few people alive have tasted it, and I’m not one of them. Those who have describe something remarkable. And I believe them.

[58:50] But here’s the part that should give every one of us pause.

[58:55] Six hundred bottles were made. And over the years, thousands of bottles claiming to be nineteen forty-five Romanée-Conti have been bought and sold. Including large-format bottles that the estate never filled at all. People who study these things have concluded that this is one of the most forged wines on earth.

[59:23] Which means that some of the people who have tasted the legend, and have been moved by it — were moved by something else entirely.

[59:32] Hold on to that thought. We’re going to come back to it, in a big way, and in the third episode of the series.

[59:40] The second bottle comes from Bordeaux. From Saint-Émilion, on the Right Bank, near the border of Pomerol. An estate called Cheval Blanc. The vintage: nineteen forty-seven.

[59:59] If you ask a room full of serious wine people the name of the greatest red wine of the twentieth century, this is the bottle you’ll hear more than any other.

[60:11] And it should have been a disaster.

[60:14] The summer of nineteen forty-seven in Bordeaux was hot. August and September were blazing, and the harvest came in during a heatwave. The grapes were full of sugar — more sugar than anyone in Bordeaux at that time really knew how to handle.

[60:33] And remember what they didn’t have. No cooling in the vats. No cultured yeasts bred to cope with very ripe juice. Just wooden vats, in a hot cellar, full of fermenting must that was getting hotter every hour.

[60:54] Yeast is a living thing. And like us, it wilts in the heat. When a fermentation gets too hot, the yeast gives up before it’s finished eating the sugar. Winemakers call that a stuck fermentation. And a stuck fermentation in a warm cellar is an open invitation to bacteria — the kind that turn wine towards vinegar. Many châteaux lost vats that year.

[61:24] Cheval Blanc’s fermentation, by the château’s own later account, was stuck too. And the wine that came out broke almost every rule a modern cellar lives by.

[61:39] It finished at around fourteen and a half percent alcohol — very high for its time. It wasn’t fully dry; a little sugar was left over. And it had high volatile acidity. Robert Parker once wrote that, technically, it was appallingly deficient in acidity and excessively high in alcohol. Jancis Robinson’s website called that whole vintage “magically faulty.”

[62:11] The man who later ran the estate described it as an accident of nature.

[62:17] Rich. Thick. Port-like, many tasters say. And to a great many of those who’ve had a real bottle, unforgettable.

[62:28] Now let me tell you what volatile acidity actually is, because it’s the heart of this story. In plain words, it’s acetic acid — the acid of vinegar. A little of it can lift a wine’s aroma and make it seem more alive. Too much, and the wine smells like it’s on its way to becoming salad dressing.

[62:58] Basically, a wine that smells a little like vinegar, but still tastes like wine.

[63:04] And here’s the thing. Our Sages discussed exactly that wine.

[63:09] The Talmud comes back to it more than once — in tractate Bava Batra, in the laws of buying and selling wine, and in the tractate Avodah Zarah. The question is very practical. If you have a barrel that’s starting to turn. It smells like vinegar — but when you taste it, it still tastes like wine. What is it? Wine, or vinegar?

[63:34] Abaye says if it smells like vinegar, it’s vinegar. Rava says if it tastes like wine, it’s wine.

[63:44] And the halacha follows Rava. The Shulchan Aruch rules that over wine that smells like vinegar but tastes like wine, you say borei pri hagafen. You can even make kiddush on it.

[64:00] Think about that. Fifteen hundred years before the summer of nineteen forty-seven, the Gemara had already ruled on Cheval Blanc. If the nose says vinegar but the mouth says wine — the mouth wins. It’s wine.

[64:17] But the Shulchan Aruch adds one more line, in the law of kiddush, and I love it. Yes, you may use such a wine. But it’s a mitzvah to choose good wine for kiddush.

[64:31] It’s kosher. It’s valid. It’s wine. And you should still reach for the best you have.

[64:38] That’s exactly the line we keep coming back to tonight. In the Mishnah, every vineyard in the land was valid for the altar, but they brought from the best. Here, a wine on the edge of vinegar is still wine, but we’re told to choose better.

[64:58] Permitted is the one question. Great is another.

[65:04] So now let’s pour our two legends side by side.

[65:10] One was great, at least in part, because its vines were dying — a tiny, struggling crop, the last of its kind. The other was great, in part, because its fermentation failed — in a heatwave nobody could control, leaving behind sugar and acidity that a modern winemaker would be fired for.

[65:36] Neither one was planned. Nobody set out to make them that way. Greatness happened to them.

[65:44] That’s the honest shape of the old legends. They were real. Some of them were sublime. But very often, they weren’t achievements so much as accidents — beautiful accidents, caught by people skilled enough to recognise them, in years when nature happened to be generous, or strange.

[66:07] And here’s the question I can’t stop asking. If a winemaker today, with every tool in the cellar, set out to make a wine as rich as nineteen forty-seven — but clean, and dry, and stable — would it be greater? Or would something vanish along with the faults?

[66:31] And that’s the question for the next episode. So hold on to it.

[66:35] But before we leave the Right Bank, let me pour you something from our own table.

[66:40] The Cheval Blanc was made from two grapes, Cabernet Franc and Merlot, half and half. Today, a few kilometres away in Saint-Émilion, there’s a classified estate called Château Bellefont-Belcier, making a kosher cuvée from the same grapes — mostly Merlot, with some Cabernet Franc. Its first kosher vintage was twenty twenty. Same corner of France, same grapes, a kosher Grand Cru Classé.

[67:18] I’m not telling you it’s Cheval Blanc nineteen forty-seven. What I’m telling you is that today on your kosher table you can taste that soil and those grapes, made on purpose instead of by accident. Fifty years ago, that wasn’t possible at any price.

[67:43] Which brings us to the last question of this episode’s history.

[67:46] We’ve met the duke, the merchants, the ocean, and the legends. Now let’s step back and look at them all together. Who were these people who chased greatness when every odd was against them? Why did they do it? And what exactly couldn’t they do — no matter how hard they tried?

Chapter 5 — Judgment, Waiting on Luck

[68:09] Let’s line them up. Everyone we’ve met tonight who’s chased great wine.

[68:15] The monks at Cîteaux, watching the same slopes for generations and building a wall around the best of them. The Duke of Burgundy, tearing out a grape. The family at Haut-Brion, putting a name on a bottle and a portrait over a tavern door. The brokers of Bordeaux, writing down the prices. And long before any of them, the Temple in Jerusalem, sending for wine from the alpha vineyards.

[68:48] In the first chapter I said something about the duke. That the people who chased greatness were rarely saints. That they were usually protecting a name, and often their own.

[69:02] The duke was protecting the name of Burgundy, which was really his own name. The Pontacs were protecting a brand they invented. The brokers were protecting a market. Even the monks were protecting the name of their house. And the Temple?

[69:21] The Temple was protecting a name too. Just not a man’s.

[69:27] That’s the one place on our list where the chase for the best wine wasn’t about prestige or profit. It was about honour — kavod. The wine was going to the altar. And of course it came from alpha vineyards. Of course it was drawn from the heart of the barrel.

[69:50] It’s worth remembering, the next time someone tells you that taking great care over wine is a modern indulgence. Our tradition was ranking vineyards for the sake of Heaven eighteen centuries ago.

[70:07] So much for the why. Now the how. Because when you put all these people side by side, they turn out to have used the very same handful of tools. They chose the ground — the right slope, the right soil, one side of the ditch and not the other.

[70:32] They chose the grape — Pinot over Gamay, the vine that gives less but better.

[70:38] They held the vine back. No manure to push it, no water to swell it, fewer grapes so each one carried more.

[70:51] And they took care of the cellar, as far as they could. Small barrels. Topped up. Only the best part of the wine.

[71:01] And they waited. They let the wine age before they sold it, or before they drank it.

[71:08] That’s it. That’s the whole toolkit of pre-modern greatness. Ground. Grape. Restraint. Care. And patience.

[71:19] And I want to be clear: those are not small things. Every serious winemaker on earth still uses every one of them. Nobody has ever invented a machine that replaces a great piece of ground.

[71:36] But now look at what’s missing from that list. Because this is where the whole series turns.

[71:44] They couldn’t measure ripeness. They tasted the grapes, and they watched the calendar, and they worried about rot. They couldn’t tell you how much sugar or acid was in the berries; they could only guess.

[72:00] They couldn’t control the temperature of fermentation. In a cold year it might never finish; in a hot year, like nineteen forty-seven, it might stick and turn.

[72:13] They didn’t understand what was happening inside the vat. The second, softening fermentation that almost every red wine goes through was, for a long time, treated as a disease.

[72:27] They couldn’t keep the cellar truly clean, because wooden vats and old barrels hold bacteria no matter how hard you scrub them.

[72:38] And above all, they couldn’t choose the weather.

[72:41] That’s why I gave this chapter the title I did. Judgment, waiting on luck.

[72:49] The judgment was real. The monks knew which rows were best. The duke knew which grape was better. The Pontacs knew how to make a wine that would last. But all that judgment then had to sit and wait for a summer that cooperated, and a fermentation that behaved.

[73:11] And that raises a question I think we have to face honestly, because it’s one that matters the most to this series.

[73:21] If the old winemakers depended so much on luck — why do the old wines have such a glorious reputation?

[73:30] I think there are three reasons. And none of them is a trick. They’re just how memory works.

[73:37] The first is that we only remember the winners.

[73:41] In the twentieth century, Bordeaux had a small club of truly legendary vintages. Writers usually name a handful: nineteen twenty-eight, forty-five, forty-seven, forty-nine, fifty-three, fifty-nine, sixty-one, and then a long wait until nineteen eighty-two and ninety. And in between them? A great many years that nobody wanted to remember.

[74:16] Nobody holds a sixtieth-anniversary tasting for a washed-out vintage. Nobody lays down a weak year for half a century. The poor bottles were drunk young, or poured away, and forgotten. So when we look back, all we see are the survivors — the wines that were great enough to be kept. The past looks better than it was, because the past has already thrown away its failures.

[74:47] The second reason is the bottle itself.

[74:50] When someone opens an eighty-year-old wine today, they aren’t really tasting the vintage. They’re tasting one bottle. One cork, which may have held perfectly or may have let the wine slowly tire. One cellar — or more likely, a dozen cellars, over eighty years, some cold and still, some not. Two bottles of the same wine can taste like two different wines. Anyone who’s opened an old bottle knows exactly what I mean.

[75:27] And as we’ve heard about Romanée-Conti, sometimes the bottle isn’t even what it says it is. And the third reason is us.

[75:40] A bottle like that is never opened on an ordinary Tuesday. It’s opened at a celebration of a lifetime, with people we love, after years of waiting. Everything in that room is telling us: this is going to be extraordinary. And you know what? It usually is. But how much of that is the wine?

[76:05] That question is so big that I’m giving it a whole episode of its own. It’s the third in this series. For now, just notice it. So was it luck?

[76:18] I’ve been using that word in this chapter. But I’ll be honest with you, it’s not a word our tradition would use. And it’s not a word I use very often myself.

[76:29] There’s a passage in the Torah, in Sefer Devarim, chapter eleven, and I’ve always loved it. Moshe is describing the land the people are about to enter. And he contrasts it with Egypt.

[76:46] Egypt, he says, is a land where you sow your seeds and water it with your foot — the farmer working the irrigation channels, the Nile always there. But the land you’re going to is different. It’s a land of hills and valleys, it drinks water from the rain of heaven. A land that the Lord your God looks after. The eyes of the Lord your God are always upon it, from the beginning of the year until the end of the year.

[77:21] That’s the vintage, isn’t it? Hills and valleys. Waiting on the rain. Every season depending on something you cannot command.

[77:32] The winemakers of Burgundy and Bordeaux would have called it luck. The Torah calls it something else. It calls it dependence — and blessing. You do everything in your power, and then you look up.

[77:47] The Mishnah we heard in the first chapter preferred unwatered vineyards for the altar. The Torah describes this land as one that waits for the rain. And the old masters of France, in their own way, lived by the same truth. Judgment — waiting on heaven.

[78:07] And here’s the irony that’s waiting for us in the next episode. This same land, the one the Torah describes as drinking only from the sky, would one day teach the entire world how to water a vine one drop at a time. But that’s for next time.

[78:27] So let me give you my honest answer to the question we started with. When did wine become great?

[78:35] Wine became great a very long time ago. In the Temple. In a monastery in Burgundy. On a rise of white sand and gravel outside of Bordeaux. Great wine is old.

[78:49] But it was rare. It belonged to a few places, and a few people, and a few good years. It couldn’t be repeated. It couldn’t be planned. And even its makers often couldn’t tell you why one year sang and the next one didn’t.

[79:11] Were the legends really that great? Some of them, truly — I believe that. But they were great the way a perfect sunset is great. You can’t order one for next Tuesday.

[79:25] Which brings me back to my own memory. The one I started this episode with. The wine on my table getting better, decade by decade, through the seventies, the eighties, the nineties.

[79:39] I think I finally understand what I was tasting. I wasn’t tasting the arrival of greatness. Greatness had been around for centuries.

[79:50] What I was tasting was the end of luck.

[79:53] I was tasting what happens when people finally learn to control the things that, for two thousand years, they could only pray about. The temperature in the vat. The ripeness of the grape. The water at the root. The bacteria in the barrel.

[80:14] How that happened — who did it, how it changed everything, and what it may have cost — that’s the next episode. And I’ll tell you about a professor in Bordeaux who told the greatest wine estates in the world to do something they’d never dare to do. He told them to wait.

[80:34] But before we close tonight, I owe you something. At the very start of this episode, I made you a promise about the duke. I told you his house was still standing. And I told you I’d tell you what they pour there today.

[80:50] Let’s go back to Burgundy one more time.

Closing — The Duke’s House

[80:54] In the south of the Côte d’Or, where the famous slopes of Burgundy begin to fade towards the hills, there’s a small wine village called Santenay.

[81:06] And in Santenay there’s a château. Old stone, a long history, and the kind of building you drive past on a wine tour and photograph without thinking twice.

[81:21] Six hundred years ago, it was one of the homes of Philip the Bold. The Duke of Burgundy. The man who, in the summer of thirteen ninety-five, called a grape very bad and disloyal, and ordered it torn out of his lands.

[81:41] The château still makes wine. For a long time it was called Château de Santenay. Today it carries the name: Domaine du Château Philippe le Hardi. Philip the Bold.

[81:58] Its vineyards run up and down the Côte d’Or. And among them is a parcel inside one particular walled vineyard you’ve already heard about tonight. Clos de Vougeot.

[82:14] The vineyard the monks at Cîteaux put a wall around in thirteen thirty-six. The wall that said: this ground is different. Remember where it ends.

[82:28] So here’s what they pour at the duke’s house today. Kosher wine.

[82:33] Over the last few years, the duke’s estate has been making kosher wines with Royal Gevrey-Chambertin. Chambolle-Musigny. A premier cru from Beaune. And, from the twenty twenty-two vintage, a kosher Grand Cru from Clos de Vougeot — announced as the first kosher-certified Grand Cru Clos de Vougeot in two decades. Think about everything that bottle carries.

[83:06] The monks’ wall from thirteen thirty-six. The duke’s decree from thirteen ninety-five. Six hundred years of choosing less wine, from the right grape, on the right ground. And then, at the end of all that history, a kosher table.

[83:26] A man who fired a grape for the sake of Burgundy’s good name — his house now pours a wine you can bless over on Friday night for Shabbat.

[83:38] I told you at the start it might make you smile.

[83:42] I don’t have one open in front of me tonight. But I know exactly the evening I’m saving it for.

[83:50] Do you remember Samuel Pepys? The tavern on Lombard Street, the spring of sixteen sixty-three? He wrote that the wine had a good and most particular taste, that he had never met before.

[84:07] Particular. A taste that belongs to one place and nowhere else.

[84:13] For most of history, a particular wine like that was something you happened upon, if you were lucky — in a tavern in London, at the king’s table, in a good year. The monks could grow it. The duke could protect it. Nobody could promise it.

[84:36] But for most of Jewish history, if you kept kosher, you didn’t happen upon it at all. Those wines were never ours to pour.

[84:47] Tonight, the particular is on our table. From the Temple’s alpha vineyards to the duke’s walled one, the long chase for wine that tastes of somewhere has come home to the kosher table. That isn’t nostalgia. That’s new. And it’s ours.

[85:11] So let me leave you with three things to take from tonight.

[85:15] The first: great wine is old. Very old. The Temple ranked its vineyards. The monks walled theirs. The London diarist tasted something particular in sixteen sixty-three. The people who tell you the past knew greatness are right.

[85:38] The second: permitted is one question, and great is another. Every vineyard in the land was valid for the altar, but they brought from the best. A wine that smells a little of vinegar is still wine, but we’re told to reach for better. Kosher tells you what you may drink. It has never told you to settle.

[86:06] And third: the legend and the liquid can part ways. They did with the very first famous name in wine. They did with six hundred bottles that somehow became thousands. A name on a label is a promise, and it’s worth knowing who made it, and when.

[86:26] And two pieces of homework, before we meet again.

[86:31] The next bottle you open, turn it around and find out where it really comes from. Not the country. The place — the region, the village, the vineyard, if it has a name. See if the wine in the glass tastes like it belongs there. You may find yourself tasting the ground for the first time.

[86:56] And the second: that question I gave you from the very beginning. The greatest wine you ever had — the one that stopped you. Write it down. Where you were, who you were with, what you remember about the wine itself. Keep it somewhere safe.

[87:16] Because I’m going to ask you about it again.

[87:20] If that wine were made again tomorrow, exactly as it was — would it still astonish you?

[87:27] Don’t answer yet. By the end of this series, I’m going to answer it myself. And I suspect, by then, your answer may have changed too.

[87:38] Next time, we leave the history and walk into the cellar.

[87:43] We’ll start here in Israel, in August of eighteen ninety, in a brand-new winery where the very first harvest went horribly wrong. We’ll meet the professor in Bordeaux who told the greatest estates in the world to wait. We’ll follow a single drop of water out of the Negev and around the planet. And I’ll sit down with a winemaker I admire enormously — a man who takes the grapes of one vineyard, ferments them thirteen different ways, and puts them back together to tell you the truth about a single hillside.

[88:26] The question for next time: when we finally learned to control everything — did the wine get greater? Or did something get lost?

[88:36] Until then, pour something honest. Something from a particular place. Look at the label, and then forget the label, and taste the wine.

[88:47] This has been The Kosher Terroir. I’m Simon Jacob. And as always — l’chaim.

Outro

[88:53] 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.

End of transcript — The Kosher Terroir, The Great Wine Illusion, Part 1: “When Did Wine Become Great?”