Vinegar, Panic, And A Shovel

S. Simon Jacob 0:08

Welcome to the Côte d'Arter Walk. 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. Rishon Lion, August eighteen ninety. A brand new winery stands on the sand hills south of Viafo. The Baron Edmund de Rothschild has paid for it all, the presses, the vats, the cellar, and the man to run it, a winemaker sent out from Bordeaux. He knows his business. He has made wine all his life. The grapes come in and they came in hot. August on the coastal plain is nothing like September in Bordeaux. The juice goes into the vats and starts to ferment. And the fermentation races. The heat builds inside the vats, and nobody can stop it. Within weeks, the first vintage of the Baron's great wine in the land of Israel has turned to vinegar. Here is what I love about what happened next. Nobody wrote to Paris for a new invention because there wasn't one to send. The Baron's people did the only thing they could think of to keep the wine cool in such a hot country. They dug. Between eighteen ninety three and eighteen ninety six, they carved deep cellars into the ground at Rishon, deep enough that the temperature down there barely moved from summer to winter. That was temperature control in 1890, a shovel. When you go down into those cellars today, it's hard to imagine the panic of that first August. But I want you to hold on to it because tonight is the story of everything that came after the shovel. And I want you to hear how a winemaker working in Israel today sums up the world before it. In his words, tradition left you only two things.

SPEAKER_00 2:42

And tradition left you with two things. One of them is terroir, and the other one is the year.

Terroir, Luck, And A Third Thing

S. Simon Jacob 2:51

The place and the luck. Tonight we find out what happens when we add a third thing. This is the kosher terroir, and this is the great wine illusion, part two, the taste of science. Last time we went looking for the great wines of the past, and we found them. A duke who fired a grape, monks who built a wall around the best ground they knew, and a family in Bordeaux who understood that a wine with a name was worth more than a wine without one. But we also found an ocean of ordinary wine all around those few islands, and we found that some of the most celebrated bottles of the 20th century were great almost by accident, a hot summer, a lucky slope, a fermentation that should have gone wrong and somehow didn't. I ended with a phrase I haven't been able to shake. I said that when I taste those old legends, I was tasting the end of luck. Tonight is about what came after luck. Somewhere in the last seventy years, winemakers stopped hoping and started measuring. They learned to cool a fermenting vat to a precise degree. They learned when a grape is ripe, not by the calendar or by fear of rain, but by numbers. In this country, they learned to give a vine exactly as much water as it needs, one drop at a time, in places where vines should never have survived at all. And so the question for tonight is a simple one. But I don't think the answer is. When we finally learned to control everything, did the wine get greater or did something get lost? I didn't want to answer that one alone, so I asked someone who lives on both sides of it. Yaakov Oriah didn't grow up in a house that drank wine. He came to it from construction, from building sites and tenders and spreadsheets. He made his first barrel almost as an experiment. Since then, he's run his own wineries, made wine for others, and become, as far as anyone can tell, the first winemaker in Israel to make what the world now calls orange wine. Today, he's the winemaker at Pinto in Yerucham, in the middle of the Negev, a place where nothing grows unless someone decides it should. He is also one of the most thoughtful people I know in the business. He uses every tool there is, and he is not sentimental about any of them. We sat down together a short drive from Jerusalem at the Gushetsian winery, with a couple of their whites opened on the table between us. You'll hear the glasses now and then. I didn't edit them out. Here's the map for tonight. We'll start with a builder's eye and the professor in Bordeaux who told the greatest estates in the world to wait. Then a winemaker who takes the grapes of one vineyard, ferments them in many different ways, and puts them back together to tell the truth about a single hillside. Or could he be inventing it? We'll ask him. We'll pay a visit to a winemaker of 1920 and ask what he'd miss. We'll count the cost of all this control because there is one. We'll go back to a legend from last time, Cheval Blanc, 1947. And this time, hear it from the winemaker side. And at the end, we'll talk about old wines, old people and the one bottle in a thousand. And I'll ask Yaakov the question I promise to ask every guest in this series. You've been carrying it since the last time. The greatest wine you ever had. If it were made again tomorrow, would it still astonish you?

A Builder’s Mind In The Cellar

S. Simon Jacob 7:35

Let's begin where Yaakov began, not in the vineyard, on a building site. A builder looks at a house differently from the rest of us. We see a home. He sees the foundation, the plumbing, the electrics, the steel, the windows, and the schedule that says which trade comes in on which day. He sees a thousand separate jobs that have to end up looking like a single completed thing. I wanted to know if that way of seeing things had followed Yaqov into the cellar. So that's where we started. Yakov, thank you for being on the kosher too. Oh, my pleasure. Again. And honor. All right. First question. You came to wine from construction. What did building teach you about making wine?

SPEAKER_00 8:28

Well, it really gave me an approach. I believe that what I learned in construction is that a house is ensembled from many, many fields and many, many details in each field. And eventually they're all supposed to be one house. It was very helpful for me to learn how to take a quote and and a tender and break it down to its elements And then later on taking down doing the going the opposite direction and taking the elements and making it to something which is a whole.

S. Simon Jacob 9:18

Thank you. Thank you for the tour.

SPEAKER_00 9:20

It's not something that directed me in my making in any way directly, but indirectly, I I think I adopted that approach of understanding a whole as the components and elements that put it together and learning how to break it down and learning how to reassemble it.

S. Simon Jacob 9:41

I have a crazy question. What's the first thing you measured in a winery that you'd have measured in a building site?

SPEAKER_00 9:53

I don't know. Probably centimeters. You know, when you calculate how many liters you have in a vet, you you use volume, volume formula, and you measure centimeters. Okay.

S. Simon Jacob 10:08

Is there something in winemaking that you've learned you can't engineer? Oh, of course.

SPEAKER_00 10:15

Definitely. It's a overused term, and I think it's used in a way that's doing it unjust, but it's so common term of terroir. Which meaning you could take any grape and make from it so many styles of wine. You can make a sparkling white and fresh crisp white and a full white and a orange wine and a dessert wine. And you could go and oaked and unoaked, and you could really take it to so many places. The one thing you can't do is replace what nature gives. I mean, in proper winemaking. I'm not talking about adding anything, I'm talking about if you're honest about it, and you just stick to what nature gives you, and I believe all winemakers that I know are strict about that. You cannot replace the the potentials. I mean, if uh Chardonnay is more apple-y or more lemony, there's nothing I could do about that. That that comes from nature, from God, from location, from growing conditions, from that year, but that's not something you engineer. That's not something you engineer.

S. Simon Jacob 11:37

Hold on to that sentence. It'll come back. But listen to what he said first. Break the whole thing into parts, then put the parts back together. That is a very modern way of thinking, especially thinking about wine. And it has a birthday, more or less.

Bordeaux Learns To Wait

S. Simon Jacob 12:00

And a home address, Bordeaux, in the years after the Second World War. His name was Emile Painault, a professor at the University of Bordeaux and a consultant to more great chateaus than anyone before him. Before Painaud, a lot of Bordeaux was picked early. Not because early was better, but because the grower was afraid, afraid of rot, afraid of the autumn rain, afraid of losing everything if he waited one more week. Rotten bunches went into the vat along with the good ones. In a hot year the fermentation ran away, and the winemaker's best tool was a block of ice wrapped in sacking, lowered into the vat on a rope. That was still happening in Bordeaux in 1961. Peino's message was almost embarrassingly simple. Wait, pick ripe, sort out the rotten fruit, keep the fermentation cool, and stop treating the second fermentation, the malolactic, as a disease. It's part of making great red wine. He's remembered for a line that goes something like, Give me good grapes and I'll make good wine. And here's where our story comes home. In the late 1980s, a restaurateur in the Judean Hills named Eli Benzakain was making wine in his garden. Somewhere along the way, the great professor tasted it. And his advice was the advice of a builder. If you want your first wine to be better, you need a second wine, somewhere to put the barrels that aren't quite good enough. That's how Petite Castell was born. Castell's Grand Vin had its first vintage in 1992, and the estate went fully kosher in 2003. Though there were some 2002 and a half bottles that were kosher. The professor who modernized Bordeaux left a fingerprint on a kosher wine from the hills outside Jerusalem. So I asked Yaakov, of everything a winemaker has today, which tools matter most? I expected a machine. I didn't get one. Cool. Which modern tool matters most in your cellar today? And what would your wines lose without it?

SPEAKER_00 14:53

Can I use an abstract term? Anything. Science. Okay. Because I think the term terroir became so important and so revered because before science, the only reason why one before science, everybody did not have science at their aid to how to teach them how to grow properly or to accommodate terroir drawbacks. And people did not have science to teach them how to make wine in a better way or in a s in a controlled way or an educated way. And the only everybody made grew equally uneducated and made wine equally uneducated. And the only difference between one wine and the other, in fact, wine was good and wine was less good was those unengineerable factors of terroir, what a certain site gave to a person, to a lot, to a grape. And I think once we added science, and that's why I'm using an abstract term, because it's not one detail. It's not understanding the metalactic fermentation or understanding the tannin behavior or understanding the sugar importance and the acid. It's not one thing. It's the approach went from being uneducated to educated. And I think comparing the world of wine before science and comparing the world of wine after science is almost not fair. So they really can't compare the two. Because if one you had one star and that was a terroir that made the difference, from one from the point when science came in, you have a million factors that make a difference. Everything makes a difference, and eventually you're ending up with a vector of the accumulated influences that you put into the into the voir, into the wine-making, into your understanding, into your decision-making, a lot of small decisions, and eventually your wine is a vector of a thousand small decisions. It's not just terroir as it used to be.

Science As A Thousand Decisions

S. Simon Jacob 17:09

Is there a tool everyone uses that you've decided you don't need to?

SPEAKER_00 17:21

I can't say everyone uses it. The general answer is no. I mean, I use tools. I uh how important it is varies. Varies from what kind of wine I'm trying to make, perhaps my mood. But they're tools, you know, they're there to solve your problems, a deliberate decision. I think uh I didn't have to decide not to do it, but I am, you know, there's a whole bunch of additives that are considered uh legitimate or legal in in the States, and as if adding color to wine. We won't do that here. Again, it's not it's not something that I had to decide not to do, it's the default here not to do it.

S. Simon Jacob 18:08

But I wouldn't do it, you know. Where is the lab in your process? Before the decision making or after you've tasted?

SPEAKER_00 18:18

Before. The really important factor is tasting, but I need data. I mean, I need to understand not just what I taste, but what's behind it. And uh I will make a decision based on my tasting, but also based on data. A vector of a thousand small decisions.

S. Simon Jacob 18:42

That's the phrase I came home with. Before signs, he's saying everyone grew grapes the same way and made wine the same way. So the only thing that could make one wine better than another was place. After signs, the place is still there, but now there are a thousand other hands on the wheel. Which raises the obvious question if there are a thousand hands on the wheel, is the place still driving? Think back to our last episode. Six hundred years ago, the people who decided what a great wine was were a duke and his council. They decided by decree, this grape, not that one. And long before them, our own sages ranked the vineyards of the land of Israel, the one whose wine was fit for the altar of the temple, and they ranked them by place, this hill, that valley. In both cases, the place did the talking. The people's job was to listen and to choose the right ground. That's the romantic idea of terroir, and most of us still carry it. The winemaker is a kind of humble translator. The real author is the hillside. Yaakov makes wine in a very different way.

Expressing A Place Or Composing It

S. Simon Jacob 20:14

He harvests the same vineyard at different moments of ripeness. He ferments each lot differently, he builds himself a whole palette of wines from one place, and only then does he sit down and decide what that place should say. So I put it to him plainly. When you use all that control, are you expressing a place or composing one? When you use all that control and the science, are you expressing a place or composing one? And where's the line?

SPEAKER_00 20:53

Well, that's a wonderful question. I I I don't have a simple answer, okay, because I I could tell you that I could elaborate on actually what I said before is the fact that we are not in a world where terroir is the key star or the key factor to make a wine better from another one. And but it makes a difference. It's the potentials that you're working with. It's it's what you're given in your hands, it's your raw material material. But I think everybody today is is making their wine. You know, I'm using the term making wine. What term did you use? Making. Oh.

S. Simon Jacob 21:51

Making a place? Expressing a place or comp or composing one.

SPEAKER_00 22:00

I th uh uh again, I'm I'm elaborating, but I think everybody is also expressing a place because they're dealing with the potentials that a place has. And again, I'm talking about assuming that you are sticking to a place. That means if you make a wine in a defined area, whether it's in the negev or it's a single vineyard or it's Ramatagolan, and you restrict yourself to a place, then the potentials that come out of the place have a chance to emerge. If you make a wine of all Israel, theoretically you could say you're making an Israeli wine. It wouldn't be really true because you're making wines of just unrelated terroirs. The terwar of the Ramatagolan is not the terroir of the Upper Galilee, it's not the terroir of Ziphronyakov, it's not the terwar of the negative. So it's a geographical term with really no identity behind it. But if you restrict yourself, whether it's to a Ramatagolan or to a single vineyard, you have their potentials specific given. That's what that place knows how to give. But wine doesn't make itself. Somebody has to decide how much yield there will be when pruning. And somebody has to decide how much leaves are gonna cover or not cover the clusters. And somebody has to decide when the harvest is gonna be in, if it's gonna be a bright, crisp wine or a heavy, mature, uh, full-bodied wine. And somebody has to decide at what point you how long you macerate a white skin before you press it, whether it's a few hours or a few days or whatever you decide to do. And somebody has to decide how when you press, how hard you press and how much extract you're gonna get by that pressing. And somebody's gonna have to decide what temperature the wine is gonna ferment at. And eventually, even if you don't consider yourself a person of intervention, everything you did was intervention. Right. So it's just endless intervention, and you're you're getting a vector of the accumulated interventions. So I don't think in any way you can make wine today without creating what you will call later an expression of terroir. You are creating it. You're you if you have a lovely, bright, crisp white wine and you're saying that's my terroir, equally you could have had a full, fully mature, heavy white wine oaked, and that would be the expression of the terroir. And both will be true, by the way, because if you played by the rules and didn't add anything, and you restricted yourself to a limited area, whether it's an area or a vineyard, you are expressing what was in that terroir. So, on one hand, you're creating it because your friend could create it in a different way. So everybody used you was actually creating it. And at the same time, you're expressing it because you're letting it be.

S. Simon Jacob 25:04

So you you're actually there was a question I was gonna ask you. If two winemakers had the same vineyard and the same tools, how different would the wine be? And you're expressing that it would be Well It could be very different.

SPEAKER_00 25:19

It could be. Not necessarily, but it could be extremely different. You will get different vectors.

S. Simon Jacob 25:28

Give me one decision you made this harvest that was about place and one that was about you.

SPEAKER_00 25:48

Okay. Well, I think the the the decisions about place were made. And the decisions about me were not made yet, but they will be. That means I at this point created my my tools for blending. It means I I I harvested my grapes at different levels of har ripeness. I each ferment each harvest I fermented in different fashions. And that was really giving the potential of my specific tools, all single single vineyards, of course. And I was trying to give place and expression to the potentials in that single vineyard based on the decision to harvest early or late, the type of fermentation, etc. And that's all about place, because I was trying to give the place as much room to express itself and to bring out what's hidden within it. Eventually I'm gonna sit down and have to make a blend. And there it's gonna be me because, you know, I like certain wines, or I think my customers like certain wines, and I will build a blend from my components based on my ideal of beauty. Whether it's my personal liking or my customers' liking, it doesn't make a difference. But that's personal, that's what's in my mind. Even if I'm thinking about my customers, it's the customers that are in my mind. They didn't actually go around everybody and asking them what do you like more? So it's my it's me deciding what is aesthetic, what is what it should be. So that will happen now. That's stage two.

S. Simon Jacob 27:27

Is there a time when you stop adjusting and let the wine just be?

SPEAKER_00 27:33

When you're happy, yeah. Okay. That means sometimes blending is smooth, happens almost by itself. You don't have to think, you just the the the the what's what's needed to be done is just clear and obvious. And sometimes it's like unsolvable riddle and just a lot more complicated than you thought. You think one thing and you add and and and it doesn't go to the direction you want. And I think what is also important is the experience that you accumulate over time to realize that it's not really so important. That means we're making a decision on say we sit on blending on Tuesday and the wines are a month from harvest. If I would sit a week later and the wines would be a week and a month and a week from harvest, and I had a different meal or I slept less good or better better at the night before, I would be a different person. The wines will be a little different, and the blends probably theoretically will be a little bit different. And eventually the the potential the options are so endless that you just gotta make up your mind and say, today I'm making blending, and maybe if I would make it in a year, I would get a much better result, but I'm doing it today.

S. Simon Jacob 28:55

Everything you did was intervention. I've been sitting with that line for days, because it takes the romance out of terroir without taking the place away. The hillside still gives you what only it can give. Yaakov told us in the first chapter that whether a Chardonnay leans to apple or to lemon comes from nature, from God, from location. No winemaker can change that. But somebody chooses how hard to prune, somebody chooses the day to pick, somebody chooses how long the juice sits on the skins, and how hard to press, and how warm the fermentation runs. And at the end, he says somebody sits down on a Tuesday and makes a blend. That part is him. If he'd made it a week later, after a different dinner, he'd have been a different person, and it would have been a different wine. That's an honest thing for a winemaker to admit, and it points straight at our question. The winemaker of a hundred years ago had the same hillside. What he didn't have was the palate. So what exactly was he missing?

What A 1920 Winemaker Lacks

S. Simon Jacob 30:18

Let's imagine him, a winemaker in 1920, Bordeaux, Burgundy, Richon Lizion. It hardly matters which. He decides when to pick by tasting the grapes, by looking at the sky, and by the custom of his village. He ferments in open wooden vats that are hard to keep clean. If the vat gets too hot, he has cold water, ice if he can get it, and his cellar. If it gets too cold, he waits. The second fermentation, the melolactic, happens when it happens, and he's not entirely sure what it is. He waters his vines with whatever falls from the sky, and everything he knows about the vineyard lives in his own eyes and his father's memory. He is not a fool. Some of the greatest wines ever made were made by men exactly like him. But compare him to Yaakov, picking by lab analysis of sugar, acid, and ripeness, block by block, tanks jacketed, holding the temperature to within a degree, a malolactic that's timed and watched, water given drop by drop, and spoilage, the constant fear of every seller in history, now rare. So I asked Yaakov to sit across the table from that man. Could a winemaker in 1920 have made these wines? And which tool or tools would he have would he miss the most?

SPEAKER_00 32:11

I think it goes back to the same abstract term of science, because they didn't have science. Science came into wine in the 60s.

S. Simon Jacob 32:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 32:21

Robert Mondavi and the University of California in Davis started to collaborate. And the research, the agricultural research that was going on in the university started to meet the reality of a vineyard and a winery. And science started to develop there, then and there. And you have an understanding what you're doing, then you can make a better educated decision. And in 1920, they had tradition. And tradition left you with two things. One of them is terroir, and the other one is the year. You know, you had better years, you had worse years. Which, you know, the really what made the wine is ter uh the meeting point of a specific year and a specific terroir.

S. Simon Jacob 33:16

Is there anything he could have done that we've forgotten how to do?

SPEAKER_00 33:30

Honestly, I don't think so. Okay. Because there was not a gap. I mean, it's not that we're trying to ignore stuff or make it simpler. Gap hundreds let's put it this way, if you're talking about the ancient grapes of Israel and how they made wine then, we have a gap. We don't know. So we're gonna try to figure out, and it could be they did things that we're just unaware of. For example, today we have fermentation vats in stainless steel and in oak and clay. Let's say if you go back, I don't know, 20 years ago, nobody heard of clay, besides in Georgia, which are doing it traditionally. If you try to go back and try to understand what they did in ancient Israel making wine, you will probably not think of clay, because it was not in your tools. Today we have more tools so you could try to understand better what they did and make educated guesses. But in modern winemaking from 1920 till now, there was a continuity. Nothing in the tradition was lost. So we've just we have the traditions, we explored them, and I don't think we're missing anything. It could be we made stylistic choices that today they we won't make. And that goes into a whole fascinating another subject of why do we appreciate wine or what makes wine a great wine in our eyes. And it could be that what they thought in 1920 and what we thought in 19, 2005 and 2010, and 2000, 2026, are different ideals of what is a great wine. But there's nothing in the process that we're missing.

unknown 35:16

Okay.

S. Simon Jacob 35:22

If you saw your seller today, what would surprise him most? If I saw who sell him today. If he if the person from 1920 saw your seller today, what would surprise that person the most? Stainless steel vats.

SPEAKER_00 35:48

I think the the loss of tradition which is the other side of science.

S. Simon Jacob 35:54

Science, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 35:55

Well, it's the only other thing that they could use to And again, I'm talking in a very continuously repeating repeating an abstract term because I think it's not one detail, it's an overall change that happens.

S. Simon Jacob 36:10

Just a small footnote, because Yaakov is a generous guest, and I want to be precise on his behalf. He dates the arrival of science to the 1960s, to Robert Mandavi and the University of California at Davis. That's exactly when science reached the cellar door in California. Mandavi opened his winery in 1966, but the scientists had been at work for a while by then. Davis was mapping California's vineyard climates in the 1940s. And Pineau was changing Bordeaux in the 50s. The sixties are when it all started showing up in the bottles. Two things he said two things he said there, stay with me. The first, nothing was lost. From 1920 until today, there's a continuous line. We kept the tradition and added the science. The real gap, he said, was much further back in ancient Israel. We don't know fully how our ancestors made wine, and only now, with clay coming back into modern cellars, do we have the tools even to guess. The second, what would surprise the man from 1920 most is stainless steel, and in the same breath, the loss of tradition, the other side of science. And tradition had one more thing in it that science changed completely. It had water, or rather, it had no water at all except what fell from heaven.

Drip Irrigation Changes The Rules

S. Simon Jacob 37:51

There's a story they tell about a water engineer named Simcha Blas. Sometime in the 1930s, he noticed a row of trees along a fence, and one tree that was much bigger and greener than the rest. When he looked closer, he found the pipe beside it with a tiny leak, giving that one tree a slow, steady drip. Whether it happened exactly like that, I can't promise you. What happened next is history, though. In the early 1960s, Blas worked on a way to deliver water to plants one drop at a time, right at the roots. In 1965, he and Kibutz Hatzerim in the Negev near Bersheva founded a company to make it. They called it Netafim. A year later, they sold the first commercial dripper. Today that idea waters farms on every continent, and almost every vineyard in Israel depends on it. Now here's the twist I love. At almost exactly the same moment, France went the other way. In 1964, a decree banned the irrigation of vines in France as Appalachian vineyards. It was written against overproduction, against the high-yielding ocean of ordinary wine we talked about last time. In France, a vine that wanted to make fine wine had to make do with just rain. The band held for decades. It was only in 2006 that France began allowing exceptions, case by case, in the hottest weeks of summer, and it loosened a little more in 2017, as the summers kept getting hotter. So there you have it. One country deciding the vine must suffer to make great wine, and the other deciding the vine must be helped to make any wine at all. I asked Jakov who makes wine today in Yerucham, deep in the negative, which of those was right? Could Yorucham make fine wine at all without drip irrigation?

SPEAKER_00 40:12

Oh, I think that question is true for most of Israel, not Yerucham. Could it or couldn't? Probably couldn't. And I think irrigation, besides very few spots that don't need irrigation because there's underwater accumulation, underground accumulation of water, most vines will probably die. Eventually they will survive. I mean, if you nourish them for long enough, their roots will go deep enough and eventually they will survive. But the vineyards that we have today would look very different if that would be the case.

S. Simon Jacob 40:52

Some of those old vine carignons stretch down to areas. And I know when I spoke to Asaf Paz, he has some he has some Carignon vines that even the vines they supplemented during the drought didn't look as good as the Carignon vines that he didn't even give anything to. Right. Because they they went so deep. All right. What does the desert give the grape that the Galilee or the Judean Hills can't? Okay. That's a no, it's a difficult question.

SPEAKER_00 41:37

When we talk about teruar, we're talking about a term that comes from terra, comes from soil, from earth. But the truth is that most of the influences that we have in hot climates, and I'm not talking about the negative, I'm talking about all of Israel, are the climate effect a lot more than the terra, the soil effect. I mean when when you have cold soils, cold climates, then the differences of soil have time to surface, or have not time, but place, space to surface. When so much drama is created by what's going above the surface, such as heat waves, direct irradiation, changes of cold, of hot and cold temperatures, which are a lot more dramatic than the subtle changes of soil types. So eventually we are talking about terroir, but we're talking about really what's going on above the teruar. And the above terroir of the Negev is pretty clear that it's different from what's going on above the teruar in other regions of Israel. First of all, we're far away from the sea. So when it gets cold at night, it gets cold dramatically and fast. When you're the closer you are to the to a to the ocean, it's a body of water. It regulates the temperature. Another thing is we hardly have pests, and we use very little pesticides, if at all, which is a very healthy thing. We also have a lot more radiation. The closer you are to the equator, the radiation is stronger, and because there's no vegetation and the soil is almost white, you also have return radiation coming down from the soil coming back up, reflecting. So the drama or the ability to pinpoint or to point the differences of what's going on above the ground and the negative is something we know how to do. And clearly it gives us different results. I mean, the grapes ripen in a fa in a faster fashion. Acids that remain in the grape that don't crash because we harvest so early. Because of the strong radiation, the grapes that we harvest usually are not green. The green flavor that you have in a not fully ripe grape comes from a growing hormone called pyrazine. And most of Israel, because we're not cold climates and we don't harvest in October, we harvest in August, we still have that green hormone present, and a lot of the wines have a green note to them. And that breaks down with radiation. But you have very strong radiation. So you find the wines of the Negev, even though they're harvested early, usually, most of them, of course, it depends on the variety and the yield, but most of them are not really green wines. Again, that's a this pretty clear distinction of that unique growing area.

Negev Terroir Lives In The Sky

S. Simon Jacob 44:58

Two footnotes, both in Jakob's favor. When he talks about that green note in some wines, the bell paper character you sometimes find in young Cabernet, the compounds behind it are called methoxypyrazines. They break down with sunlight on the grapes and with heat. So the Nekev's fierce reflected light is doing exactly what he describes. It lets him pick early, keep the acidity, and still lose the green. And notice what he did say with the word terwa. Terwa comes from terra, the soil. But in a hot country, he says, most of the drama happens above the ground. The cold nights far from the sea, the light, the heat waves, in the negative, terwa is mostly the sky. There's a passage in Devarim I quoted last time. The land of Israel isn't like Egypt, where you water the fields with your foot. It's a land that drinks the rain of heaven, and its people live with their eyes on the sky. I think about that verse every time I see a drip line running down a row of vines in the negative. We didn't stop looking up, we just learned to help, one drop at a time. And as Yaakov reminded us, with Asaf Paz's old Karanyan vines, the ones whose roots went so deep they never needed the help, sometimes the vine knows best. So science gives us more wine in more places, more reliably than ever before. That has to be good news, doesn't it?

When Control Makes Wine Boring

S. Simon Jacob 46:51

Every revolution has its critics, and this one had them early. Even in Pinault's lifetime, people complained about penozation of Bordeaux. The fear that one professor's good advice, followed by every chateau at once, would make them all taste a little more alike. A generation later, the same complaint followed the flying winemakers, the consultants who jet from one estate to the next. The most famous of them, Michel Roland, had heard it his whole career. So I asked Yaakov to name the price, one wine or one kind of wine that's better because of modern control, and one that became less interesting because of it. His answer surprised me.

SPEAKER_00 47:48

It's a group of wines. I think the high-end wines, the ones that we pay a lot of attention to in the vineyards, selecting the best spots, growing the type of grapes that are suitable to the to that spot, and giving it the best exposure and the right proper yield and harvesting at a time and giving it, you know, what we call premium wines. I think our premium wines are probably better. And I'll get something to talk about your Chevrolet that you started to talk about before. What I think we're missing out on is the simple wines. Because the simple wines used to be a simple wine. Take a grape, you ferment it, you don't have no expectations, it probably didn't last a lot long, but it had vibrance that today in mass-produced wines that are the to be to be economical, the the vineyards are probably overcropped. And over the good the winemaking is overextracted, and uh eventually you get something that's dull. I think it's uh abusing the vineyard, but you can get cheap wine. And a cheap wine that's lasts and it stays, and I find, I don't find any wine kind of service that will appreciate a cheap wine. Not because of it. Again, you have your exceptions, and a lot of people play games with that, and they find a good wine that's cheap, but usually we'll find the wine that's just boring.

S. Simon Jacob 49:30

Right. Is there a time you fixed something and regretted it afterwards?

SPEAKER_00 49:47

Yeah. I I uh I don't know if fixing is the word is the right is the right word, but eventually when you you blend, you're using different components. One of them, the early harvest, is uh to give it good acid, and the late harvest is to good give it good uh flavors and fruit. And oak, you know, eventually you're making decisions trying to anticipate where everything you're putting together will go in the future. Doesn't always work. Doesn't always work. If I had if I put a great percentage or relatively big percentage of early wine into early harvest, into the final blend of the wine, I'd be very happy that I get all this vibrance and fresh notes and all that, but eventually the wine might be dull. I could taste the wine and say, oh, this just needs some more oak. And I leave it longer in the oak, and it overoxidizes, you know, it's it's not exactly fixing, but as I said, wine doesn't make itself. It's an accumulation of decisions. Not all decisions are are take the wine where you want to go, where you want it or hope it to go.

Why Wines Start Tasting Alike

S. Simon Jacob 51:07

Does precision wines does precision make wines taste alike? And how do you guard against that in your own cellar?

SPEAKER_00 51:19

I I'm not sure it's precision. And yes, wines are becoming alike. And I don't think precision is the cause for that. I think control of getting a certain flavor. Yeah, but there's something even before that. That means if when we make wine, we are not making wine in an in a detached world. Eventually we want somebody to buy the wine. Yep. And we want somebody to appreciate the wine. And a lot of times we want our critic to give it a good score so people will buy the wine. And you could see that wine, let's let's say let's talk for a minute about Bordeaux. The old the older Bordeaux were let's say at 12.5% alcohol ripe. And you could blame global warming for the fact that the Bordeaux today have higher alcohol content, but I think even before global warming, Bordeaux wines started to become more ripe and more fruity and more accessible at early age because the American market started to consume wines, and the American market was relying a lot on Robert Parker's and his and his scoring, and those are the kind of wines that he gave higher scores. And if the producer in Bordeaux wanted to have his wines at the high score, he knew what to do. He will just get his wines a little bit more ripe and will get probably a higher score. And eventually you see the wines becoming alike, not because of precision, but because of decision. Somebody decided that the wines have to be in a certain way. And when a lot of people are making the same decision, everybody, of course, has their different potentials from their specific plots, and everybody has their knowledge and their technology. But eventually, the aim to please whether the customer or the critic, assisted by the fact that we have the scientific knowledge and know-how, will eventually bring bring wines to be more similar to each other.

S. Simon Jacob 53:41

Yeah, I think that was one of the biggest with Michel Rulin. They that they complained that he's making the whole wine world, you know, uh the same thing rather than these styles. Could you pick out a pinto wine blind in a lineup of Israel? Could you pick out a pinto wine blind in a lineup of Israeli reds?

SPEAKER_00 54:07

I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure I know how to pick up my own wines in general. I think there's some wines that I would be able to, but can't guarantee that.

S. Simon Jacob 54:22

Who in Israel is making wines that taste like nobody else's?

SPEAKER_00 54:36

I I don't have a one-person answer for that. I think I think there's a whole group of producers out there that wine is not a hobby. Because when you have when I say hobby, I'm not saying it as a negative thing. I'm saying is that your level of understanding, your processes and knowledge is at a level of a hobby. So, and and when the wine comes out good and it tastes good, they're happy, and their customers are happy, and it's and it's a great experience. There's levels of understanding, processes of people that spend their days and their nights thinking about that. And it's not just a side activity, it's a full activity. And they have understanding of what they do. And I don't think any of them is making wines like anybody else. And you have a whole I I don't want to mention people because I'm because I'm gonna miss out on others, but there's a whole group there in the middle, not the big wineries and not the hobbyists that are professional winemakers and medium sky medium scale production. They know what they're doing, and what comes out is what they wanted it to come out. Of course, with variations of errors and uh bad years, etc. But you could get good wines today.

S. Simon Jacob 56:01

I I think there's some of the most I call them creative winemakers. Um talking about the same thing in different words. Yes. And I just think that there's so many incredibly creative winemakers in Israel now that just produce almost magical results. I agree.

SPEAKER_00 56:22

So again, it's a group that it's beyond the hobby and not dictated by commercial concerns, and that gives them the freedom to use their knowledge to make creations.

S. Simon Jacob 56:34

Two things in that answer have changed how I think about this whole series. The first is the simple wine. Last time I told you about the ocean of ordinary wine that surrounded the great estates of France. I'll admit I painted it as the villain of the story. Yaakov paints it differently. The everyday wine of a hundred years ago had no ambitions and probably didn't last. But it had life in it. Today's mass-produced wine is cheaper, cleaner, and more stable, and often duller. The great wines got greater, but the everyday wine lost its pulse. The second is a single sentence. Wines aren't becoming alike because of precision, he said. They're becoming alike because of decision. And whose decision? The producers, yes. But behind the producers stands the consumer, and behind the customer, very often, stands the critic. Bordeaux got riper and rounder, Yaakov believes, because that's what the scores rewarded, and the chateaus knew exactly what to do. That's the bridge to our next episode, and I'll leave it to stand there for now. One more thought before we go on, because it's ours. If you want to see what control really means, look at a kosher seller. Who may touch the wine, when and how, is governed by a body of law far older than any thermometer. You can find it in Tractate of A Zara and in the Shohanarach in Yoradeya. The most carefully controlled sellers in the world may well be the kosher ones, and the creative winemakers Yaakov was describing, that middle group of professionals who know exactly what they're doing, include some of the most exciting kosher producers in the country. Control and freedom, it turns out, can live in the same cellar, which brings us back to the hardest word in the series, great.

Cheval Blanc And Wine Aesthetics

S. Simon Jacob 59:01

What actually makes a wine great? I asked the winemaker, and he went back two and a half thousand years to answer. Last time I told you about Cheval Blanc, 1947, one of the most celebrated red wines of the 20th century, from a summer so hot that the fermentations in Bordeaux ran out of control. A wine that today's laboratory would flag for its volatile acidity and that collectors still treat as a kind of holy relic. I told it as a historian would. This time I want to hear it from a winemaker. So I asked Yaakov whether making wine has changed how he tastes old legends. He asked if we could go back to Chevelle Blanc. And then he took a much longer road than I expected, starting with the ancient Greeks. Somewhere along that road, you'll hear us stop to taste what was in our glasses. Stay with him. It's worth it.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:07

Can we go back to your Chevelle Blanc?

S. Simon Jacob 1:00:09

Okay, yes.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:10

Yeah.

S. Simon Jacob 1:00:10

Let's do that.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:11

Let's do that. Okay. Okay. I'll get to it. But first of all, the answer is yes. I will judge it differently. And I think that when we appreciate wine we have to talk about broader term, and that is in general, wine aesthetics or aesthetics altogether. What why why does a wine be considered great or amazing or outstanding? Iconic is the term I Iconic is the term I use. Iconic.

S. Simon Jacob 1:00:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:54

Just okay. I buy the term. I think when you talk about aesthetics, there's two major approaches or understandings. I think the Greeks were the ones that believed that aesthetics are within nature. That means there's specially special um ratios that you will find within nature that are perfect and they I really want to taste this.

S. Simon Jacob 1:01:28

Go ahead. We're actually at Gouchet Zion winery and we're tasting two of their whites. The first one was a Sauvignon Blanc. I love the Sauvignon Blanc, I really enjoyed it. Really good, very enjoyable. And this is a Rousanne. This is a 2025 Roussan. Oh, we ever read it. Yes.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:51

I mean, uh they looked for certain ratios. The mathematician Fibonacci found a serial series of numbers within nature that correlate with what the Greeks did as in their in their in their buildings. And you refer to beauty as an absolute, okay? And then we have the other approach saying the beauty is in the eyes of the viewer, of the beholder. Of the beholder. And when you come to talk about wine, so the question is, what are we talking about? Are we talking about a wine that's absolutely good? Or is it in the eyes of the beholder? And when you say the eyes of the beholder, you're going to a tricky debate or question. Super subjective. Yes. But it's not only subjective. It's subjective in a world where we appreciate what we don't have. That means the ideal human figure in times of poverty was somebody that was well built, or we would call today overweight. And when we are in a in a culture where we have abundance of food, our ideal are skinny people. And because it's hard to reach and it's special.

S. Simon Jacob 1:03:15

I wondered why people strive towards being skinny. I could never understand that. But uh

SPEAKER_00 1:03:26

I'm not talking about you and me, Simon. I'm just talking about in general. So when you find something that's outstanding, you will probably get a wow effect. And what's common, you probably wouldn't. Okay, so I'm talking about if you want to talk about the Chevroblan um 1947, it was a very high alcohol content for that time. I mean that they were having 12, 12.5% in in alcohol. They had Chevroblan was around 14.5%. Yeah. 14.4 to be accurate. The residual sugar was around five, four or five grams per liter, which is still dry in our standards. It was very ripe. It had a high level of volatile acid, acetic acid, but not very high. Okay. It was around 1.16 or less less than what we call in standards. That means if you would find if you would go back uh 20 years to uh hot climate red wines before we took in and started to respect science, you'll have you'll find a lot of wines like that not long ago. But for us it's just too much and overpowering. In 1947, it was uh it was incredible. Okay. Now, could it be that beyond what I just said, there's something objective that the harmony of those components just set together so well that it became from beauty in the eyes of the beholder to an absolute beauty because of the harmony? I think that was there too, because great wine critics many years later still gave it high points and didn't refer to it as date juice. Right. That's pretty much probably what it was. Right. So when you talk about wine, I think you have both. I think you have an internal harmony that makes a wine great or appreciated, or you could be the best connoisseur, or with the most understanding of wines, and somebody knows anything, and both will agree that it's a it's a fabulous wine. The problem is that I don't think there's one balance like that. Talk about potentials of grapes and you know the vectors of different winemakers. I think there's many points. That such a harmony could emerge. It could be at a such a harmony could emerge at a crisp, early early harvested wine, and at a full wine, and at a port, at a, you know, at a dessert wine. And each have their set of harmonies. And I think what makes the eyes of the beholder have his opinion, I don't think that sentence made little sense in English. It does, it does. Make sense. Is not only what's rare, but I think it's something that has to do with fashion. And I think fashion is something that we cannot leave untalked about when you want to talk about the greatness of wine. Because if you talk about, if you go like 10, 15 years back, let's say to the kosher world, we appreciated wines that are 15% alcohol, even 20 years, 15% 4.5%, 14.5%, 15 years, overextracted, oaky, and we thought those were amazing. And they could have had their inner balance and they could have been amazing. And today in fashion, we look for wines that are leaner and more red fruit and more acidic, and there's no right and wrong. And it could be that in a few years we'll go back to overripe wines again. And today sweet wines are out of fashion and go back a hundred years ago or two hundred years ago. The whole wine world was going crazy about Tokai sweet dessert wines. And you know. So when you talk about greatness, I think you have to talk about a few things. What's not easy to reach, fashion, and probably some internal absolute beauty, which has to do with inner harmony, which is very hard to pinpoint, but I think I think it's there here and here and there you could find it. Okay. Going back to your question, if I would judge your wine differently, I don't know. I mean, I probably would, because I don't know how to put myself in the shoes of somebody who's drinking a Chavot Blanc at the right time when that was in fashion. Here today, and probably wouldn't appreciate it.

S. Simon Jacob 1:08:10

Your tasting is more critical of what your expectation is. Of today's. I guess most people are like that. I you know, some people get get. As an example, do you think a famous label changes what people taste? I think physically it does. I don't know if it would for you, but there there were studies that were done that where they put a person into a scanner, a brain scanner, and they let them taste wine. And very often it was the same wine, but they told them that the price was higher. And it wasn't that they thought the wine was better. Parts of the brain lit up that showed that they were having a much better experience. Not just, you know, this wasn't just like, oh, you know, you fooled them, marketing. This is like marketing that really made a difference in their experience.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:16

So I think you gave him the opportunity to taste what's rare, what's unclear. Right. We talked about a minute ago. Right. For them it was rare. Yeah.

S. Simon Jacob 1:09:25

Yeah, I get yep. I'll give you the numbers because Yaakov did, and I want them on the record. Cheval Blanc, 1947, came in at 14.4% alcohol in an era when twelve was normal. Its volatile acidity was a little over a gram per liter, and it never fermented completely dry. The published figures put the leftover sugar at around three to three and a half grams per liter, a touch below Yaakov's estimate. By today's standard, a winemaker who made that wine might be shown the door, and critics still give it a hundred points. Here's what I heard in Yaakov's answer. Greatness isn't one thing. It's three things braided together. There is rarity. We prize what's hard to reach, the vintage that comes once in a generation, the wine we can't afford, the ideal that's just out of grasp. Then there's fashion. Not long ago, the kosher world adored wines at 15% alcohol, dark, oaky, and extracted. Today we chase leaner wines with red fruit and fresh acidity. Two hundred years ago, all of Europe was mad for the sweet wines of Tokyo. None of those tastes is right or wrong. They're the fashion of their time. And underneath both of those there's something he calls inner harmony. Hard to pin down but real. When the parts of a wine fit together so well that a novice and an expert both stop talking. That's what he thinks the Cheval Blanc had beneath everything else. That harmony, I think, is what the old masters were chasing with no tools at all. What science has changed is how often we can find it, not whether it exists. Before we leave that conversation, one more note. You heard me tell Yaakov about a brain scan study, the one where the same wine poured with a higher price on the label lit up the pleasure centers of the brain. If that sounds familiar, it's because we talked about it in your next favorite wine lives next door. And it's where we'll start next time. Because if science can change the wine, the label can change the drinker. But first I owe you an answer. I promised to ask every guest the serious question, so I

The Bottle That Changed Everything

S. Simon Jacob 1:12:24

did. You've actually been carrying the question since last time. Here's how I put it to Yaakov. A wine that astonished you early on, if it were made today, would it still astonish you?

SPEAKER_00 1:12:40

I don't have a clear answer to that. I could say that the wine that astonished me is, you know, is a very distinct wine. I was at a wine tasting, I think it was in 2004. I was just getting taking my first steps. I was already a wine, that was my hobby. I was into it, trying to taste wines and get it understand them. 2004 was the first year I was actually making wine. And I went to an open house of wines and I tasted a French Mersault from Burgundy. It was Legend Everyere, the single premiere crew, made by Madame Leroy. It it really, I think it changed my life because not only did I did not know white wine could be like that, because at the time I was, you know, giving all my focus to red wines, I didn't know any wine could be like that. And it was so impressive that I think that that wine had a lot of influence in me becoming so focused in my in making white wines and then trying to understand the difference between in white wines between cold and hot climates, and trying to develop methods to challenge it, and all that started with really with one wine. I don't know how it tasted today. What? Was it the wine, the moment, or who you were with? No, it was not it was it was not who it was out. It was the wine itself. It was the open house, it was like little booths tasting different wines. I was just chatting with friends. Nothing nailed me in my place when I tasted it, but nothing about the environment was encouraging such an experience. Wow.

S. Simon Jacob 1:14:28

Um Has an old wine ever disappointed you? And did you actually say so?

SPEAKER_00 1:14:38

Many times, and and I and I said it out clear out loud. I I age wines. And the reason I age wines is not because we don't have refrigerators and m meat and vegetables uh spoil and cheese spoils and wine survives. I mean, the reason I age wines is not because it could survive, but because I expected to develop. And I found plenty of wines. Some of them that I aged myself, some of them that I didn't age myself, but was expecting to get some incredible experience. And at the end they're like people. Which means that, you know, in the Ahadut we refer to as zakin, somebody that gains experience and knowledge, and somebody that has life experience, and you can learn from him. But that's a rarity. Most people are just very boring when they get old. They talk about their doctors and their medicine, and and you know, most people are not inspiring old people. I think 95% of old wines just get old. Yeah. The ones that the ones that do develop, I think it's a spiritual experience. To really I it happened I don't know. I think one in a thousand bottles that I open that I'm elevated. I'm I'm I it's it's emotional, it's spiritual, I'm in a different world. And I will and I'm continuing to age wines knowing that only a few of them are gonna really give me this. High. It's not even a high, it's an elevation. Right. Well, high and elevation are pretty much the same thing. But yes.

S. Simon Jacob 1:16:22

I sound something that is for the substance. It's not the substance, it's it's it's a spiritual thing.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:29

And and so many times I get disappointed, and I'm gonna continue doing that because when it happens, it's magical. I shouldn't care. But I get upset at people when they post that this wine is so old and it survived. And I taste it. And I said, You shouldn't open it 20 years ago, it tastes the same.

S. Simon Jacob 1:16:49

That's the whole issue with wine. You know, a lot of people ask me, you know, should I hold it longer, what have you? And I said, look, there's certain things that age does to wine, but there are wines that hit that high, that peak, and some of them, especially if they're Mavushal, I find they don't change. But aging them isn't going to make them any better. They're they're good now. Drink them now. I don't know how it tastes today. That's the most honest answer to our question I've heard yet. The wine that changed his life is fixed in a single moment. An open house, little booths, chatting with friends, and then one glass that stopped him where he stood. He can't go back to it, and he knows it. And then he said something I want to linger on because it comes from our own tradition. Wines he said are like people. Most just get old. A few become zakanim, elders. The Talmud intracta Kedushin has a teaching on that very word. A Zakane is one who has acquired wisdom. Age alone doesn't make you an elder. What you gain along the way does. That is exactly how a winemaker should think about the bottles in his cellar. Most will simply get old. One in a thousand, Yaqub says, gives him what he calls an elevation. And he'll keep putting bottles away for the rest of his life, knowing most of them will let him down because of that one.

Orange Wine And Whole-Grape Truth

S. Simon Jacob 1:18:35

I asked him for one more thing before we finished. Yaakov is known in Israel for something that when he started, nobody here had a name for. When you make white wine, you press the grapes and ferment only the juice. When you make red, you ferment the juice together with the skins. And that's where the color and so much of the character comes from. Yaakov came to wine from the red side. And one day he asked a question that seems obvious once you hear it. Why do we throw away the skins of white grapes? You made Israel's kind of first orange wines. Yes. And do you feel that that was a step forward or a step back to something more ancient?

SPEAKER_00 1:19:32

Well, when I started to make orange wines, I was not aware of any ancient such activity or production. I was not aware of the world trend. I was just coming from the production of red wine where I understood how important the skin is and how important the ratio of skin and juice was. And all of a sudden, white wine you throw away the skin, they just make wine from the juice, and it just didn't make any sense. And my teacher at the time told me that that's how you make white wines, and I asked him why. And he says, you know, because that's how you do it. And it was an answer that was not satisfactory to me, but I didn't study winemaking. And I also didn't come from a house that drank wine, so I didn't know what white wine is supposed to be. You know, it's just that's all new to me. So I said, hey, let's try it. So I tried it, and I liked the product, and then in 2010, I made my first product of skin macerated whites. And I I thought I was the only one in the world doing that. I wasn't aware of any tradition. Only when Daniel Rogoff came to the winery and tasted it. He told me it's why it's orange wine. I heard the term for the first time. I don't know what he was talking about, really, honestly. So I can't say it was any way a tradition. For a long time I believed that that's the essence of the grape. If you want to have real white wine, don't want to have a white wine that's telling the story only of the juice. But you want to have the white wine that's telling the story of the whole grape. And it's it's it's a beautiful idea. But our palates are not used to it. I mean, the consumption of orange wine is was not and is not great. It's it's there, people like it occasionally for those who do, but it's not something that it's not to go wine, it's not your everyday wine. But I still think for me it was a step forward because I was for many years trying to bring about concentrations to a white wine that I was not able to get in hot climates. And in our story together with Toe Vavo, I learned that the combination could add an aspect or a dimension to white wines. And once I started that, I really started with why only orange, and I started a whole bunch of other kinds of odd and unconventional fermentation forms, and eventually came up with the wine called multiple expressions. So I think for me it was an important step. But it's not a step, it's not a step that I stopped by. I mean, it didn't stop there. It was a step on an ongoing journey.

S. Simon Jacob 1:22:22

I so enjoy your experimentation and your creativity, and I really I'm looking forward because there is no way I could have thought of orange wine, and there's certainly no way I could have thought of multiple expressions. And and some of the iterations of that are like to me the best white burgundy coming out of Israel. So it's like amazing to me, and I'm and I'm and I'm looking forward to continuing the ride.

SPEAKER_00 1:23:03

Well, the good news is that this because I got really excited about this this approach, I actually planted vineyards four years ago. And this year for the first time, I'm making the multiple expression wines under a larger selection of grapes. Okay. Well, Sauvignon Blanc. I'll see where that takes us. Wow. Have you tasted any of the new Greek like Acertico? I've been with Acertico for from 2010. Okay. In 2010, I had a winery in the Negev called Asif. Yes. And it was important to me to make local wines, and I didn't know what grapes to use, and I corresponded at the time with Jensis Robinson. And she told me that probably I need to plant in the Negev a Cirtiko. I never heard of it. So I got on a plane to drove and flew to Santorini and had a wine tour in 2010 with understanding a Sirtiko. And I I think it's a fabulous grape. I still didn't taste what's coming out here in Israel. There's some new ones coming out. The new ones are coming out this year. Yeah. Right.

S. Simon Jacob 1:24:24

Yeah. That are I'm looking forward to it. Me too. Me too. Me too. Some of those creative winemakers are uh coming out with some crazy stuff. So definitely. I'm really looking forward to. Thank you. Thank you, Yaakov, for being on the bush. Really a pleasure. Pleasure for me, especially. Amazing. So thank you. Thank you. A note on dates. For the record, Yaakov's first experiments with white wine on the skins goes back to around 2007 at his first winery. The first one released for sale came in 2010, and it was the late Daniel Rogov, for years Israel's best known wine critic, who tasted it and told him what the rest of the world was calling it. But listen again to how Yaakov described that first orange wine. Not as a trend and not as a return to anything. A white wine that tells the story of the whole grape, not just its juice. And where it led him is the wine promised you last time. Multiple expressions. One vineyard's grapes were picked at different moments and fermented in different ways. Each lot a different voice from the same hillside put back together into a wine. The science didn't flatten that wine, it made it possible.

Two Experiments To Try This Week

S. Simon Jacob 1:25:58

We started tonight in a hot August in Rishon Litzion with a vintage turning to vinegar and men with shovels digging their way down into the cool earth. I asked whether once we finally learned to control everything, the wine got greater, or whether something got lost. And here's where I've come out. Both. Three things I'm taking with me from this conversation. One a wine today is a vector of a thousand small decisions. The place is still there, and nothing will ever replace what the hillside gives. But the winemaker is no longer only a translator. He is in part its author and the honest ones will tell you so. Two, control made great wine more possible more often and in more places than ever before, including places like the Negev, where fifty years ago nobody would have planted a vine for fine wine. But the everyday wine paid a price. And when wines start to taste alike, it's not the science doing it, it's the decision about whom the wine is meant to please. It's what's rare, what's in fashion, and underneath both a harmony that's hard to name and impossible to fake. The old masters found it by luck and patience. Even though we can find it more often now, we haven't made it any less precious. Two things I'd like you to do this week. First, find a white wine made on the skins, an orange wine if you can, and a kosher one. There are more of them now than there used to be. Taste it next to an ordinary white from the same grape and ask yourself which one tells you more about the grape. Second, open one bottle you've been saving, not the most valuable one, one you've been waiting on. Find out whether it became an elder or just got old. Either way, you'll have learned something. And maybe it's just the one in a thousand. The next episode is the last part of this series, and I think it's the hardest question of the three. Not what's in the glass, but what's in our head before the cork comes out. I sat down with Jeff Morgan for years he tasted and judged the world's wines for one of the most influential wine magazines in America. Then he went and made a kosher wine all his own and watched the critics score it. He has stood on both sides of the label. And he has a story about a famous critic, a blind tasting, and his very first Chardonnay that I promise you won't forget. The question for next time how much of what we taste is the wine, and how much is the story we were told about it? Until then, pour something honest, something somebody made with care, and a thousand small decisions. And before you judge it, taste it. Lehaim.

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S. Simon Jacob 1:29:47

This is Simon Jacob again, your host of this episode of the Kosher Terroi. Please subscribe via your podcast provider to be informed of our new episodes as they are released. If you are new to the Kosher Terroir, please check out our many past episodes.