Michael Kay, Invei a Winery Built on Resilience

Welcome to the Kosher Teruah. I'm Simon Jacob, your host for this episode from Jerusalem. Before we get started, no matter where you are, please take a moment to pray for the safe return home of all our soldiers, If you're driving in your car, please focus on the road ahead. If you're relaxing at home, please pour yourself a glass of wonderful kosher wine, sit back, relax, and enjoy. I'm Simon Jacob, and welcome back to the Kosher Terroir. Some winemakers are born into it, raised between the rows with a family name on the barrel. Others arrive by accident. My guest today is the second kind, and his story shows how much wine is about saying yes when the wrong phone call comes. Michael spent years learning at Hagafen under Ernie Weir. He worked at Four Gates in Santa Cruz, a winery with a near-cult following. He crossed the ocean to intern at Shiloh, in the Judean Hills under Amichai Luria. He then went on to another extreme, serving as a mashgiach in E&J Gallo, where kosher products are measured in tanker trucks rather than barrels. Meanwhile, back at home, he was making wine in a friend's basement, and it was winning awards in homemade competitions against wines that That had no kosher limits at all. Today, that basement project has a name: Inve, from Inve HaGeffen, the vines of the grape. Michael runs it with his partner, Rabbi David Berkowitz, whose own path into wine began when a grower handed him a free ton of Zinfandel and said, essentially, let's see what you can do. Envay is a winery without a vineyard and without a sign out front. It works from a garage and buys fruit from growers across the region. The lineup is unusual for kosher wines: Petite Syrah, Gewürztraminer, Muscat Canale, and a Malbec Rosé. These are wines made by someone Who wants you to taste something you haven't tried before. If you heard Michael's first visit on the show, you know his origin story. Today we go further. We'll talk about what it means to make wine from vineyards you don't own, what Gallo taught him that a garage could never, and how a mashgiach thinks When he becomes the winemaker, so pour something interesting, ideally something you've never tried before, and join me with Michael K. of Inve. Welcome back to the kosher terroir, Michael.

Thank you.

So I'm joined by Michael K. from Inve. Inve Agafen is what do you call the company exactly?

Inve.

Inve.

Inve.

Okay.

It comes from the phrase "Inve Agafen" in Tanakh.

Okay. Got it. So welcome back.

Thank you.

Welcome back.

It's good to be here. Good to see you.

For the listeners who missed our first conversation, how did a mix-up turn a book editor into a winemaker?

Okay. So in 2009, when the economy crashed after the housing crisis, I'd been working at a book— as a book editor for many years. And I suddenly had a lot of work dry up. I was quite worried about the situation, and I spoke to one of my rabbis in Berkeley about the situation, and he said, well, look, I can give you some kosher supervision, some mashgiach gigs, until things pick up. And I said, I don't know how to do that. He said, I'll show you how to do it. And so I started doing things, you know, bat mitzvah, bar mitzvah, Visiting a soy sauce manufacturing plant, things like that. And then one day, the rabbi calls me and he says, look, I just got a call from the OU and they have requested you to oversee a champagne production. And I said, well, that's surprising because I've never worked for the OU and I don't know anything about champagne. Then he told me how much it paid and I said, I love champagne. And so what happened was the next day, I drove 2 hours north. I was living in the Bay Area, drove 2 hours north to a place called Hopland and went to this champagne-making facility and was looking for the person who was in charge and finally found him. And I said, hi, I'm Michael. I understand you request me for the kosher supervision. And he said, you're not the Michael we wanted. So he got on the phone to my rabbi. And it turned out there'd been a different Michael that had lived in Berkeley several years beforehand. And that's who they thought they were getting. But now everything was already set up. They had 25 people there ready to do the work with us as well as the vats and everything else. And so he said, looks like we're going to teach you how to make champagne. So I spent a week learning how to make champagne and overseeing things and checking with the rabbi to make sure I was also checking the kosher elements of the creation and the production. And at the end of the week, I'd had a great time and they said, well, why don't you come and do a harvest with us in Napa? And this turned out to be Hagafen with Ernie Weir. Wow. Ernie wasn't at the Champagne facility at the time, so I didn't know that's who it was. And I ended up working a harvest down there. And I kept telling Ernie, I said, you know, look, Ernie, I'm a book editor. And so when things pick back up, I'm going to go back to the book editing. Well, I kept telling him that for 5 years. And at some point I had the chokmah that maybe I'm supposed to be here paying attention to the winemaking. And so I asked Ernie one of the years that I was there, could I— Yeah. Do you have any extra grapes? I could try my own hand at this. And so he did. He very graciously gave me— let me and some friends come and pick some of his second-tier grapes. And I tried my hand at winemaking at my home, and the result was disastrous. I really—

That was the Zinfandel, wasn't it?

No, the Zinfandel disaster was after this. But I realized that Ernie made it look very easy and it was not, and there was a lot for me to learn. So, it was actually great that it was a failure because then I had to learn all the things I should not be doing when making wine and all the things that I needed to do to protect the whole process. And so, the next year, I went and purchased my own Syrah grapes from a place in Sonoma and made a beautiful Syrah. A small one barrel. And I was so excited and people loved it that I was like, I'm going to make this again. Well, after I released my wine, I reached out to the vineyard owners. Turns out they had sold their vineyard to a home developer. So those grapes were not available. At the same time, or roughly thereafter, a A Chabad rabbi, who is a friend of the family, knew that I worked in wine, and one of his congregants had just purchased a vineyard and offered him free grapes if he'd like to make wine for the community. So, he reached out to me, knowing that I was in winemaking, and said, hey, would you like to help me make some wine? So, I said, sure. So, we went and we looked at the vineyard, and we ended up getting a few tons, or maybe a ton and a half of Zinfandel. And it turns out the grapes weren't that great. It turned out that we had issues in the facility that we were using. And that Zinfandel was so bad, we just dumped it in the streets of Oakland. And little children ran over, you know, the stream of vinegary wine. And so I was very frustrated, but But the rabbi said, the Chabad rabbi said, well, do you want us to choose a different grape and try it again next year? So I said, okay. So the next year we were walking through the vineyard and I tried some of the Malvasia grapes and they tasted phenomenal. They didn't taste like any other grape I'd had. They tasted like lychees and peaches and that was just the grape. So I said, let's make some wine with this. So we got new equipment and we Learned a lot. And so we made this Malvasia and I wasn't quite sure how good it was. And I heard through a friend that if you submit your wine to the California State Fair, the judges will give you feedback, what's working, what's not working. I thought, okay, this would be a great chance to learn. So we submitted the wine and a few months later I get a phone call from the head of the fair judging committee saying, look, your Malvasia won the double gold. Wow. And I said, what's the double gold? He said, well, that's when all the judges give you a gold medal, you get a double gold. I said, great, that's great feedback. And we were completely shocked. I mean, we really didn't anticipate that at all. And this was going against non-kosher wine, any wines. And so we did that for the next 3 years in a row, winning double gold each year. And then we expanded and did Muscat Canelli, which was similar to Malvasia in that it's also a very floral, aromatic type of white wine. Yes. And we made some Cab and we did a little bit of this and that, and then finally decided, well, we're doing well. People like our wine. We're winning awards. Why don't we get commercially licensed? So we started that process. in 2018, which requires getting the facility license and going through lots of different governmental hoops from the city level to the federal level. We finally got our license March of 2020, perfectly timed for the COVID epidemic. Right. Which, if you remember at the time, was an experience where people didn't know, can you scratch your nose? Can you touch a package? How close can you be to each other even if you're outside? So we were licensed, but we didn't feel safe to be working. So we didn't make any wine that year. And then the next year there was the fires in California, and a lot of the vineyards were really damaged by smoke taint. And so we didn't do that. Then finally we harvested, we made some wine. And then the Ukraine war broke out, which I wouldn't have thought affected anything in California, but it turns out the Ukraine is a very large supplier of glass. The bottles. So we had wine, but now we couldn't bottle it. And what normally would be a process of calling up one of the glass distributors and getting the bottles that week turned out to be a 6.5-month wait to get bottles. And so we finally technically launched in 2023. With a rosé and with our Muscat Canelli. And let's see, what else did we have that year going into it? Maybe we had the Gewürztraminer as well. We were just doing white. And that began the process of getting out, really out into the world and being able to sell it to anyone that, I mean, obviously over 21, but to anyone in the country. And so we started the process of doing private tastings for people in their homes around the country. I did a number of tours, probably did 50 or more tastings that year where I would travel to, let's say, New York, set up 5 tastings in different homes, do an evening with a couple, and they would invite their friends and people would get to enjoy the wines. And it was, while exhausting, it was really great because basically it was a party each night and people were engaging in the wine in a really pleasurable space with their friends. It was like an ideal situation, which I didn't— I hadn't sort of put it all together until I was experiencing it. And so that became— it started to open up a different aspect, a different side of the winemaking process, which, as you know, Simon, as a collector, wine brings people together.

Yep. And that's the best part of

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

So, I've got a follow-up question.

Yeah.

Looking back, what did editing books teach you that turned out to matter in winemaking?

That's a very good question. Nobody's actually ever asked me that. The first thing that comes to mind is that as an editor, there's 2 aspects to the editing. One is developmental editing, which is where you're working on the overall, let's say, structure of the story, the overall development of characters. And the other is the very nitty-gritty. Is there a comma where it should be? Is everything spaced properly? What's the font size, etc.? And As I'm sitting here thinking, those 2 aspects really are reflected in the winemaking process because you're looking at the overall story, which is what kind of grapes am I getting? Where are they coming from? How were they tended in the vineyard? And then how do we want to take them through the winemaking process? Are we going to do cold fermentation or cold soak? And then what temperature are we going to ferment at? And et cetera, et cetera. And what kind of barrels? And this is all the Let's say the character development. Yeah. But then there's the highly specific things which most consumers and maybe even winemakers are far less interested, but which are essential, which is making sure to have the right amount of chemicals added to keep everything sanitized and therefore protect the wine and the grapes from oxidation, microbial spoilage, etc. And this is a very Yeah. It's a very important part of the winemaking process. Thankfully, one of my teachers, Amichai, at Shiloh, where I interned in 2016, really, really made this point hit home. And because you can get one tiny little microbe and it can spoil a 10,000-gallon tank. And so you have to be very particular in being clean in the winery. But also what I have found is You have to be thoughtful, sensitive, and careful when you're doing additives. So for example, one of the things that we deal with in California and also in Israel is we get, because of the temperature, we get very ripe grapes. I mean, you can obviously pick earlier, but if you want the fullest expression of the grape's flavors, you might Harvest when it's, say, 25, 26 Brix. But the problem is, as the sugar is increasing, as the flavors are developing, the acidity is decreasing. Yeah. And so oftentimes you have to make acid additions to the wine so that it's balanced. It doesn't taste cloying. And also so that it will preserve its freshness, much like squeezing a lemon onto a salad or onto a fruit salad. And so you have to be very careful because once you've added too much acid, you can't take that away. I mean, there are processes, but then it becomes super complicated and it can damage wine. So you have to be very careful and take a small amount of the wine, add a little bit, and finally get it to the place where it's like you're cooking and taste, ah, that tastes right. And so you can't just throw stuff in because I don't want to have to go through this whole day at the winery where I'm adding tartar. You have to be patient. And that's one thing I will definitely give my partner big kudos for. My partner is Rabbi Dovber Berkowitz, Chabad of Walnut Creek. He is very patient with the development of the wine. And I am often saying, we've got to get— we've got to move on this or it's not going to be good. And he's very good at saying, okay, let's see how this develops, which is— You know, I mean, you were sharing with me earlier, you've got a very large family, Baruch Hashem. And I think with children, it takes time for them to fully develop. And much like wine is the same way. So those 2 aspects of editing, I think, are reflected in the winemaking. And this is really the first time I've considered that.

Did you ever meet the Michael that was supposed to be there? At the winery?

No, I didn't.

Just curious.

Yeah, I don't think I did.

Okay.

He's a mystery, Michael.

Okay, cool. Okay. So you've worked at a number of wineries in all sorts of functions. You've worked at Hagafen. You've had some experience in each of these. Hagafen, Four Gates, Covenant, Shiloh, Gallo, which is about as wide a range of wine offerings as you can get, especially from kosher to even non-kosher. Well, actually, Gallo was kosher, but it was for flavors.

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

Awesome. So what's the one lesson you took from each of wineries?

Well, I suppose the lesson I took from Gallo was if you can make $3.5 billion net profit as a privately owned family business, you can afford a helicopter. Okay. You can fly to work. One of the things I think, and this goes for Gallo down to the smallest, that I learned is that You can't sweat or overstress about lost wine because inevitably, and I think every winemaker has dealt with this in some capacity, when you're transferring wine from, say, a tank to another tank, which is usually the racking process, you're getting wine off of the lees that have sunk to the bottom, which is a very common thing. And there's other moments where you're moving wine for various reasons, but that's probably the most common. There are many times where the tank that you're pumping into will overflow, or the hose will burst because there's— or pop off of the connecting valve because it's not tight, which is a really unpleasant situation because now you've got, depending on the size of the winemaking facility, anywhere from tens of gallons to hundreds of thousands of gallons, which I literally would see at Gallo, wine spraying everywhere, a hose flying through the air, or wine overflowing the tops of tanks. And I've seen this at all the wineries. And As a winemaker and also when it's a business, it can be terrifying. Oh my God. And you just have to let that stuff go. And that was one of the things that I noticed that the more seasoned winemakers would just say, yeah, it happened. Okay, now we gotta clean. Now we gotta do this. This is part of the process. And it's interesting because winemakers generally are very detail-oriented people and they They tend to get pretty uptight about things because in some ways you have to be that way. But with this aspect of the winemaking thing, it seemed to be a universal, okay, that's part of the process. But what I took from each place in particular, very interesting. Some of what I took from each place was what I didn't want to do. So at Gallo, for example, Gallo is like an oil refinery. It's so massive. I mean, they're producing 110 million cases each year at this one facility. You have to drive across it to get to tanks. And while I may be envious of their profit, I didn't want to end up working in a refinery. Because in many ways, it's very impersonal and there's not a lot of connection between the employees because there's so many. So I realized like this is not what I'm looking for. On the other hand, at the far end of the spectrum would be Benio, Benio Mincance at Four Gates, who does everything himself. Yeah. One-man show. And no equipment. I mean, meaning, I don't mean no equipment, but like every winery I've been to uses forklifts to lift the barrels, to lift the grapes. Benyo does it all himself. That means he's got a full barrel that weighs 600 pounds and he's moving it up the side of his hill to move it from his cellar up to where he's going to be transferring it to a tank by himself. Over milk cartons. It's—

How does he do that?

He takes milk cartons, this is what I saw, and he puts them— he builds sort of steps with them up a hillside and he just rolls it up himself. It's unbelievable. And I realized, okay, Benyo's superhuman and he's also just a super— he is a superhuman. But that's not what I want. So I wanted to find something and create something that had the personal touch that I saw in the small facilities, but, but also had some of the processes, equipment, et cetera, that I saw in the large facilities. And so I think my partner and I have done that now. And what that— has allowed us to do is to be experimental and to try all sorts of new things. And almost inevitably, every time we think there is some mistake that's occurred at this stage in our winemaking skill set, it turns out, oh, that's just a different style of winemaking. There's a whole group of people in Southern Italy, France, or Davis who only make their wine that way. So it allows us to be nimble without having everything just fall on one person. And that's structurally something I've gotten.

You did explain Inve in the past, what it means and why did you choose it?

Oh, so Inve was my partner's idea. And it means grapes of. It comes from the phrase Inve Agafen, grapes of the vine. So His idea was, well, Inve. So if we whatever we're making, like now we're making Barbera, Petite Syrah, Petite Verdot, for example. So Inve Barbera grapes of Barbera, and also it's it's a name that hadn't been taken. So that's another just practical aspect of it. But it's very interesting because people read into the word a lot. The the English word that some people pronounce it envy. Some people think of it as Enve, like to rail against the system. And so it's, in a sense, it's taken on a life of its own, but that's, that's pretty much it. And we wanted it rooted in, in the tradition. So.

Enve doesn't have any vineyard. How do you choose growers? What are you looking for when you walk the vineyard, especially one that you don't own?

So, first I start with what kind of grape do I want? Do I want, say, Barbera? Do I want Petit Verdot? Do I want a Muscat Canelli? Okay, so once I know what kind of grape I want, then I—

How do you choose that?

Well, that's largely come about through tasting wines and thinking, God, I'd love to make this kind of wine. And this kind of wine is not so available in the kosher world, or this kind of wine I think I could make better or I could make differently than is available. I mean, that happened with our dry Muscat, which is typically made semi-sweet. And I think we were the first people to make it dry in the kosher world. And phenomenal wine, really interesting because it was very aromatic and it was dry. So it was beautiful to drink. Once I've figured out, okay, I'd like to make this kind of wine and I'd like to do it in this style, then I do 2 things. One is I first see, is there anything available out there? And in California, there are grape growing boards on the web that you can go on and you can see, okay, what offerings are out there. There's also newsletters and other things where growers advertise, but there's a main spot. And Once I see what's available and where it's from, then I do a few other things. I research to find out what is the best terroir for that particular grape. Usually this has to do with temperature ranges of the weather. And then—

And that's based on altitude for the most part, isn't it?

Well, not in California. It's more—

Which side of the mountain?

Yeah, right. So, so for example, like Pinot Noir prefers things a little bit cooler, right? So the Carneros region that you get these marine breezes off of, off of the sea there that keep— that come in and, and keep the weather cooler. But for a varietal like Petite Syrah, which likes things hotter or Traditionally, you want to be more inland. And so once you go over the coastal range and you go inland, there's just more heat being retained in the valley there. And so, so it's, it's really more location than elevation because I don't know if there's that much grown that high in— I mean, there are, you know, small mountains in Napa. And there are We get our Barbera from the Sierra foothills, which is at a slight elevation, but it's not huge. And so then what happens is I will first ask to get a bottle of wine that has been made from the grapes with a particular vineyard. So let's say I might choose 6 different vineyards across the state who are making a particular grape, and I'll ask them to send me wines that have been made from it, or to give me the names of companies that have made wine from them, if that's possible. And that's often one of the main litmus tests. I can pretty much eliminate most of them because most of them will not be to the standard or to the taste profile that I'm looking for. And so then once I narrow it down to this one seems to be producing something Good. Then I can go visit the vineyard and see what the growing practices are like, but also see what the maintenance of the vineyard is like. One of the things I learned from Amichai, we would walk through the vineyard and when we were here in Israel, and he had developed his sensitivity so he could smell if there was something rotting in the vineyard, you know, a cluster of grapes, he could spot it. And after a period of time, I was able to pick up on that scent as well. And so one wants to be able to see how clean the fruit is during its growing process so that you can have a, hopefully a sense that, oh, you're going to be getting clean fruit. You're going to be getting healthy fruit. Then also it comes down to the people. Most of these vineyards are owned by families. And I, you know, if I get a good feeling about the family and I like the vines and the grapes and the wine that's been made, then— That's the way to do it. There's also sometimes historical things. So for example, like our Barbera, we first got some Barbera from Central California and it was really not good. And so we didn't turn that into a wine. And so I subsequently did more research and it turned out that Barbera has a long history of being made in the Sierra foothills by Italian immigrants because it's a Traditionally an Italian varietal. And so they found a spot that emulates Piedmont in Italy, and they produce wonderful grapes.

Wow, that's very cool.

Yeah.

Very cool.

And now, you know, for example, that family I'm a little friend— I'm friends with, they send me— their daughter became rodeo queen. You know, it's kind of a random thing. I get a video on my WhatsApp one day, and here's this young woman coming in, getting this rodeo queen procession, and the family was just so proud. They're like, we just wanted you to know that I told you, which is not something I think about when I got into winemaking. But this is another way in which wine is a real connector between people.

Very cool. Can you walk me through harvest day at Inve, kind of hour by hour, what that's like?

So you start off the morning completely exhausted already before anything has happened. Why? Because in the weeks leading up, you're so busy calculating and organizing all the different logistics that go into things, from getting the grapes there, from getting the tanks prepared, from making sure that you have all the equipment necessary, to making sure that you've got the meshkikhim, and then you've got the people who are going to be cleaning things, and you've got the forklift ready. There's a lot that goes into making sure that everything is in place. for the day that the grapes arrive. It's like the grapes are like a leader of a country coming to visit. And you want to make sure that every fork has been placed properly on the grand banquet table. Yeah. And so that they arrive and are really cared for. So, that all comes before the grapes even arrive. But then once the grapes arrive, it

When does that happen?

Well, you know, the ideal is that the grapes all arrive by, say, 7 AM, maybe 8 AM, because I like to work in the cooler part of the day for a variety of reasons, primarily for the fruit, but also because as it gets hotter and hotter during the day, it gets exhausting. But sometimes things happen. You know, a vineyard might call me and say, look, our head picker called in sick this morning. We got some other people. It's going to be a little bit of time till we get there. We won't be there till say 11 or something like that. And so there, there, or there's been a traffic accident on the freeway. I was going to say. Right? I can't control the entire world as much as me and I think all of us would love to be able to do. And so things happen and you have to be prepared for that mentally, and you have to prepare your crew for that. Because particularly, the guys who are doing a lot of the hands-on stuff are young, eager, ready to go. And if you say, hey, look, nothing's going to happen for 3 hours, go dolphin or whatever, you have to then get them motivated again, 3 hours later when the grapes arrive. But assuming everything runs as it should, Essentially, the grapes arrive on a long platform bed truck in half-ton bins. The bins we then lift off of the truck with a forklift. Those are then piled in an area that's shaded to protect the fruit. And then we have, I think, the standard equipment that most wineries have, which is a hopper, which is the thing that you dump the grapes into, the receiving bin. Mm-hmm. Then guides the grapes into the crusher, which crushes the grapes. And then the must, which is the grapes and the juice, get basically sucked or pumped from the crusher into the tank. And when all of this is happening, there are, there are things that as the winemaker I'm doing, which are things like take— getting samples of the juice, checking its pH, checking its sugar level, checking its titratable acidity so that if I need to make decisions right away in terms of I'm going to add some tartaric acid or something like that, I can do it in the early part of the wine's process so that it integrates into the flavor and doesn't stand out awkwardly at the end of the winemaking process as like an added flavor, like too much salt. Mm-hmm. So I'm checking that. I'm also just checking— a lot of what I'm doing is checking the fruit. Because sometimes I've had this experience where somebody sells us grapes and the top layer looks great. And then as you're going down through it, you're discovering things aren't ripe, there's things that are rotted. And I've had to make the decision before, we can't use these grapes, we have to return them. And so there's just a quality aspect to it. The other thing that happens in winemaking, and I've experienced this at most places, is that things break. And you have to be prepared for that. And I can think of a couple instances at our winery, but at other wineries where, let's say it's a year where there's not a lot of rainfall, or there's less rainfall. The good thing about that is you get a more concentrated flavor, more concentrated flavors in the berry. The bad thing about that is there's less liquid in the berry. So when it's going through the crusher and then into the pump, it can actually get clogged because there's not enough liquid to move it through. Mm-hmm. And so then you can have machines breaking down, and you may not even be aware of what's happening until it's happened like 3 or 4 times in a row in the course of an hour. And then you have to be prepared to either repair the equipment, add something, add water, figure out how you're going to manage that. It's a bit of a It's like a MASH operation. You're out on the battlefields and you have got to figure these things out right now because the fruit, especially once it's been crushed, is going to start to ferment. And you don't want it to start fermenting before you're ready for it, before it's in the tank, essentially. And that can happen with any number of things. There can be a sudden heat wave that day and maybe your glycol chiller, which is the machine that pumps glycol around the tanks to keep the tank temperatures regulated. So, for example, we're generally trying to keep the tanks cold so the fermentation doesn't take off right away.

Is that because you're doing whites or is it both?

For us, it's both because what it does in—

These are the jackets that go around the tanks.

Yes.

So, you're pumping glycol through the They have stainless steel jackets that are integrated into the vat.

That's correct. If you look at a picture of tanks, many tanks, you'll see these dimples all over the side of the tank, and that indicates that it's got a jacket for this liquid glycol to flow through, which is essentially a material that you can either make hot or you can make cold, and it will cool the tank. And the reason We want it cooled. There's, well, there's maybe 3 reasons. The first and most important is we want to be able to have to control the rate of fermentation. You

want to slow it down.

So, we want to slow it down. So, we want things to get cold right away because at 50 degrees and above, things will ferment. They may even ferment slightly at lower temperatures, but that's generally the bottom. And once it's gets to 85, the multiplication of the yeast just flies off the handle. And so, you can have an extremely fast, sudden fermentation that you're dealing with, and you haven't really prepared yourself for it.

Is there a problem with fast? I would think that you want to ferment this as fast as possible so you can put it in the bottle sooner and everything is great.

From that perspective, it would make a lot of sense. But from the perspective of how the wine's going to taste, there are other considerations. For example, with white grapes, if you ferment at a cooler temperature, we like to ferment around 50, 52 degrees, which is very low. The fermentation goes very slowly, and what it does is preserves more of the aromatic compounds. So you get a beautiful nose. The second thing is whether it's white or red. For us, while we have done natural yeast fermentations, we generally prefer to use specific yeasts that have been shown to pair really well with particular grapes or particular winemaking styles. And so, we want to be able to have some time to kill off the native yeast, which is done when we do an SO2 addition. We want the juice to be sitting there cold, not being able to ferment. And then we want to be able to add the yeast when we're ready. And by ready, What I mean is that you're going to be increasing the temperature of the vat, and so the yeast that you've added are going to begin to multiply. But the yeast, in addition to the sugar that they're eating in the juice, which is what they're going to convert into alcohol, they require other nutrients. Just like a human, there's all sorts of nutrients we need to function well. And so those nutrients are often added at different stages during the fermentation. If the fermentation goes too fast, you miss the ideal range to add the nutrition. And so, you may end up with some off smells and off flavors, things like that.

Cool. You've described it so beautifully. I just— I want to tell you, I've never heard it described so precisely.

My pleasure. Thank you.

No, it's great. It's really great.

The other thing, I just, let me add something to that.

Yeah. Continue the story though, but go ahead.

Sure. So because we don't have the ideal lab situation like a Gallo where they've got multimillion-dollar lab equipment and can test for everything instantaneously, we send out, as most wineries do, or many wineries do, samples of our juice to get it analyzed, to really understand what are the different chemical and nutrient sort of ratios that are in there. And so, if we buy ourselves some time by keeping the juice cool before we make any decisions about the wine and what we're going to be adding into it, it gives us time to get lab results so that we can be more precise with how we're treating the wine.

How long does that take?

Sometimes, I would say in general, it takes about 2 days.

Okay. Wow. So, you can stop a wine from fermenting for 2 days?

You could stop it for several weeks. I mean, many people do these cold soaks for red wines, and they keep it cold for 3 days, 2 weeks. I know, I think Josh Rinderman down in South Africa, a friend of mine, I believe he does quite a long cold soak for his reds.

So, what does that add? Color?

It can add color, You know, it's a good question. I think what it does is it creates smoother chemical bonds between the polyphenols, the different scent and flavor and feel chemicals in the wine so that you get a smoother wine. The extraction of color, while yes, you can get Maybe, maybe a little more color by doing a cold soak. I can tell you from Gala, where they were specifically manufacturing color from grapes, they want it as hot as possible because it's heat that actually extracts the color.

Okay, cool. Being a mashgiach before you were a winemaker, how does that background shape your decisions in the cellar?

Well, the one thing that, that does is It means that if I'm going to— probably if I'm going to be researching any particular type of thing that we might consider trying in the wine or adding in the wine, for example, there are tannin powders, let's say, that one can add into the wine that will impart certain positive tannin flavors or tannin feels into the wine. So as a former shkiah, I know that I need to first find which ones are kosher. And then from that, I can select. Because if I read about one and like, wow, that sounds phenomenal, but it's not kosher, then I can't use it. So, that's primarily where it comes up with additives.

What's the rest of that process?

Yeah. So, okay. So, let's say you've harvested it, you've crushed it, it's all sitting in the tank, you're ready for fermentation to begin. Right before the fermentation begins, if you've gotten your lab results back and you see that, you know what, the acidity is too low, that's a classic thing, then you can more precisely decide how much acid, tartaric acid, which is made from grapes, it's not just some sort of cleaning acid or something. Yep. You want to add. Then that also determines the pH and therefore the stability of the wine as well. So you want to get that right. Then once you increase the temperature of the tank through the glycol, you then are going to, at a certain point, be adding some of those nutritional things. Dimonium phosphate is one of the things that grapes do well to have available to them, or for yeast to do well to have available to them as they're doing the work of munching through the sugar and converting it to alcohol. So you're monitoring the sugar level. When it gets a third of the way down, so let's say the sugar level is, let's just say 24 brix. So when it gets down to say, I don't know, 16 brix, then you're going to add, we call it the food, the food for the yeast so that they have what they need to be able to continue to do the process. Because one of the things that winemakers, of the many things that winemakers can be concerned about, one is a stuck fermentation. Yeah. The yeast either— they don't have enough nutrition to finish the job. And so then you've got all sorts of complications that could occur. And so you're trying to just basically make sure that as the process goes through, the yeast are getting the nutrition they need, they're getting the right temperature to do their work, they're comfortable, they're being taken care of. And then The thing that we're basically monitoring through the remainder of the process is how much sugar is left. Most of the time we are aiming, except for our semi-sweets and some of the iced wines we've made, we're monitoring the sugar and hoping that it gets to no sugar left, which interestingly enough on the, the Brix readers, the thing, the devices we use for measuring the sugar is often actually -1. It's kind of strange, but— and the reason we want that there is, well, first of all, we're making a dry wine in most situations. And so we want that from the flavor, but also it's really important for stability. If in my early years before we became commercial, we had a vintage of wine that we thought was dry and we bottled it. And then when it was in room temperature rooms, it started to ferment again.

Ferment inside the bottle.

Right. First of all, most people don't want a bubbly Cabernet, right? For example. And so, A, you don't want that flavor, but B, if you don't have the right closure on the top of the bottle, things pop out. And I had this happen. I mean, I remember I actually had a few bottles, and I was driving out to visit Amichai in the Shomron, which, you know, is sometimes a place where you might get a little bit nervous about what's happening in the political situation. And I heard what I thought were 2 gunshots, and I pulled over immediately. And it turned out it was the corks in my wine that had popped out and hit the ceiling of the car because it was a hot day and the fermentation had begun.

Wow.

So yeah, so you, you live and learn, thankfully.

Which wines in your portfolio Do you think they're the most underrated?

I'm going to say the most underrated of our wines are the Petit Verdot and the Gewürztraminer. And let's start with the Gewürztraminer. So I got interested in making Gewürztraminer from doing a tour in Alsace with a friend and tasting lots of Gewürztraminers and feeling like, okay, I want to make this. That grew out of my experience of having made the Malvasia and then the Muscat Canelli, which were, which were very highly aromatic wines. And Gewürztraminer is also very aromatic. Rose petals, grapefruit, all sorts of interesting scents. And, uh, first of all, most people have never heard of Gewürztraminer. And if they have, there's a, in the kosher world in particular, there's a very limited amount of options to to experience it. Also, Gewürztraminer, although I've made it dry, we make it semi-sweet. And the reason is because, first of all, I just like that flavor. I think it's just delicious. And I think a lot of people hold back from sweet wine because they think it's going to be cloying or like Manischewitz or something. And really what I found is that almost inevitably everyone who tries the Gewürztraminer is really wowed by it. Mm-hmm. And they just love it. And this could be— I'm talking about people who maybe only drink French reds or something, right? Right. And because it's got an incredible aroma and it's just a beautiful flavor and it's pleasurable to drink, particularly with spicy foods. It really goes great with very spicy foods. And, you know, it's surprising, but it's just a nice balance. The other interesting thing about Gewürztraminer is it's one of the few whites that ages really well. And I discovered this by doing some research that Gewürztraminer has certain properties in its skins that allow it to age much longer than, say, a Sauvignon Blanc or a Chardonnay or something like that. Which means, let's say you buy a case of Gewürztraminer, over the years it's going to evolve and it's going to have different flavors that it reveals, which makes it a more interesting wine. And the second thing is because we've kept it semi-sweet, the sugar acts as it does in jam, as a preservative. Preservative. And so Gewürztraminer can last 10, 20 years, and you don't know where it's going to take you on that journey, but it, it's very interesting. So that's one. And the other is our Petit Verdot. And the reason I, I say our Petit Verdot, which Wine Enthusiast gave a 90. So, you know, it's, it's been recognized as a good wine, and hopefully it'll— the scores will increase over the years as we get better and better. But the, the reason this particular, like, the particular vintage of Petit Verdot that we have out now is interesting is that we blended a bit of Petite Syrah into it, and it just comes together in such an interesting way. It's one of those wines, it's a little bit like The way that most people experience orange wines. It's interesting. It's an interesting wine. There's a lot of layers. There's caramel, and there's cigar box, and there's pine, and it's got this interesting blend of savory and dark fruit. And so it's— I see it as like dark chocolate. It's not as accessible as our more fruit-forward wines, but it retains a surprisingly interesting deliciousness. And particularly, it's great for Shabbat because you open it Friday night, it's very intense, it's very tannic. And then by Shabbos lunch, a lot of that has smoothed out. So then you have the bottle, say the second half of the bottle again. And it's a completely different wine. It's luxurious. And who doesn't like luxury with chocolate?

I actually like luxury with chocolate.

I love that too.

That's my craze. Is there a variety you're dying to make but haven't yet?

I'm interested in Montepulciano.

Okay.

The Italian varietal. I'm interested in that.

Do they grow that?

They grow everything in California. You can pretty much find almost anything there. I mean, there may be varietals, I don't know, like Pinotage, that's South African, that they don't have there, but maybe somebody's growing it. That's something that's of interest to me. Also of interest to me is doing some skin macerated Wines, but my experience with a lot of skin macerated is they're all interesting and only a few are actually also delicious. And so I feel like I haven't done enough research on finding which ones are that way and seeing if there's a pattern between different winemakers that leads to something deliciousness. I tried something from Hungary actually last year. that was phenomenal. I mean, it was just a phenomenal wine. But I tried it in Texas. I wasn't able to get a hold of the winemaker. So, I don't know what they're doing that led to that. And so, I think while it's the natural winemaking and the skin-fermented winemaking is an interesting part of the winemaking world, I want to make sure that it stays within the realm of yummy as well before I would put that out.

Your partnership with Rabbi Berkowitz started with that free ton of Zinfandel. Actually, it started before the free ton of Zinfandel, but now we've learned. How do the two of you divide the work, and where do you disagree the most? Aren't these great questions?

I'd love to hear his side of things because it It would be very refreshing and probably challenging to hear what I do that drives him crazy. But I, well, let me first address the first question. So Dov Baer works with people all the time. He's a Chabad rabbi. He's got a huge community, kids, you know, parents, the elderly, singles, married, all sorts of things. So he's always dealing with people. So I think one of the things for him that he loves— Yeah. and he's really passionate about is equipment. He's our equipment guy. It gives him a break from all that people management and he gets to focus on equipment. And he's kind of a known entity in the secondary market for used wine equipment in the United States. He's known as the Rabbi.

Wow.

He had people in Texas, you know, non-Jewish people call him up, hey Rabbi, we've got a I don't know, bladder press that just came available. You interested in this? And he loves that.

So does he buy for other people too?

What's that?

Does he buy for other people too?

Sometimes he does. He buys on the side and then he resells.

Okay.

Just because in his research he'll come across a good deal and we don't happen to need whatever the piece of equipment is, but he knows it's something good and he'll get that and he'll resell. And he just loves getting into the nitty-gritty of pieces of equipment, but also all the electrical sides of things. He can repair wiring, he can repair plugs, he can repair generators, he can fix the glycol chillers. He set up all the temperature control things in the winery. We have an area of the winery, for example, that's just kept— not the tanks themselves, but the space at around 45 degrees where we put grapes when they arrive. Or other parts of the space where we're aging wine at a different temperature. He set up all that, all the construction side of things, all of the infrastructure. That's him. And he's passionate about it, which is great because personally, I'm not that interested in figuring out 3-volt prongs versus regular electricity, et cetera, et cetera.

3-phase.

3-phase. Exactly. There you go. Case in point.

It's okay.

Case in point. Good point. So that's something that he really brings both an expertise and a passion to, both the equipment from the side of making sure everything works and getting what we need to make the job easier and more efficient, but also negotiating it and getting us a good price so that we can hopefully continue to avoid debt, which is something that That we've prided ourselves on. The other thing that he, as I mentioned, he spends all of his time with people. So when he does a wine tasting, people love him because he's such a people person. And so he's really good at making people feel included and really being focused on a person when they're asking questions about the wine. It's great. And then the last thing that I think I might have mentioned previously is that he's very patient. And that balances out my sort of maybe more aggressive, like, let's get this done, let's get it out, or it's not going to work. He's a little more even-keeled. And so that's something I think that I really value about him. I think the areas where we differ are, I am always pushing to do more and more. And he— wants to go slower in terms of expanding the brand, expanding our offerings, expanding the size of our company. And in the last year, I think we have come to a better shared vision for the company. And so one of the things that we're really focusing on this year is expansion, both in terms of distribution and then in terms of places where people can purchase the wine. Because a lot of times people will come across our wine at somebody's Seder or somebody's Shabbos meal. And let's say they're visiting from the East Coast and they're seeing their kids in LA and they come across my wine and then they want to get it on the East Coast. Well, they can certainly order from us and we can ship to them. But as much as we ship wine and many people do buy over the internet, most people— still go into a store. And so one of the things that we're working on is making it more available to people on the East Coast, for example. And so that vision is, I think we're finally, I think, on the same page with that. And I'm hoping that it's really going to be a banner year for us in terms of developing that and really broadening it. And along those lines, I'll say 2 other things, which are we're in the process of raising capital for people to invest in the winery. If anybody has any interest or questions about that, they're welcome to contact me. They can find me on theinvay.com and send me an email via Invay or through you or whomever. But the other thing is that I've realized in the process of— and I mentioned this earlier— the process of promoting the wine, That we're offering wine experiences to people. So in addition to say flying to the East Coast and doing a wine tasting in a person's home for all their friends, which now becomes another part of what we do as a winery, we also do private tastings in my home. So I've had groups of people come and I make a dinner for them and we go through all the wines and it's a great experience. I've done it for— In particular for like recently married couples as part of their honeymoon. They'll often come to Northern California because they want to tour wineries and they'll come and they'll have a dinner by me. And it's really, it's something I didn't anticipate would be part of my winemaking life, but it's something I really enjoy.

Last, what's the varieties that you have? What do you have to offer as far as grapes right now?

So what's, what's currently bottled that people can purchase is Petite Verdot.

Yep.

Barbera, Gewürztraminer, Muscat Canelli, and the very tail end of our rosé, our Malbec rosé, which is probably our most popular wine. I mean, we're, we're probably down to a couple cases. So all of those are available depending on where a person is. We sell in a lot of stores in Los Angeles and the Bay Area. We're in a few stores in New York and New Jersey. And then we also ship nationally around the country through our website, invae.com. So people can order things. If they have questions, they can send an email. And if— what we try to do is if people order a case online, we waive the shipping so that It costs the same as if they had bought it in a store. So yeah, those—

And it gets shipped to your doorstep.

It gets shipped to your doorstep. Right.

Which is better than buying it in the store.

It's actually better than going to the store because you don't have to schlep it home.

It's there. Right. 100%. I love that idea. I absolutely love that idea.

And you can put together a mixed case or however you want to do it. You can also— it's nice. You can buy it as a surprise gift for a family member. Hey, I got you a bottle of wine, Dad, and that kind of a thing.

Very cool. One last question that I want to throw out there.

Sure.

If you could make one wine in Israel, where and what would it be?

That's a great question.

Because you've had some experience here.

Yeah.

And I can find people for Rabbi Berkowitz to take care of here in Israel. There's plenty of communities. And—

Wow, that's a very good question.

I always try to get people to move over.

Yeah, of course.

But go ahead.

Of course. I mean, I had an experience the other night. I was swimming in the pool at the Ramada Hotel here in Jerusalem. And I was in the change room afterwards, and this man comes over and he starts shouting at me in Hebrew. And My Hebrew is okay, but it's pretty limited. So I just asked him, did he speak English? And he switched to English. And it turns out he was just praising me on my swimming technique. And he was just like, you're a fantastic swimmer. Where did you learn? Blah, blah, blah, blah. And then as so many Israelis have done in so many moments of my life, he said, and when are you moving here?

Yep.

Right? So nobody does that when you go to Hawaii. But when you come to Israel, when are you moving here? We want you here. I, you know, when you asked me that question, the first thing that came to mind is I'd love to do something in the desert. I mean, I'm always fascinated by places like Yathir, and I just think that that's an interesting place to do wine, to do vineyards. I think probably also someplace up like near Zichron. Mm-hmm. Just because of the terroir, the temperature, that kind of thing, I think is probably great for California. Very California. I mean, these are these places that I'm more familiar with how to navigate. I'm sure there's many parts of the country where I could learn different parameters of the vineyard and the winemaking. I mean, people do so many different things here in so many different ways. They're so creative. Right. I'm thinking of Sura and their iced wine, you know, they make the Gewürztraminer, they freeze and then they press that. And who would think that a phenomenal iced wine would come out of Israel? It does. And so where I, like I said, I'm interested in the desert. I'd be interested in Zichron Yaakov. But ultimately where, I'm not sure. I'd like to do— I'd like to look further into what is not being offered in Israel. So, like I mentioned, the Montepulciano, I don't know if anybody's making that here.

I don't think so.

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

Thank you. Thank you very much for being here. My pleasure, sir. Thank you very much for being here.

Always good to see you. Always good to spend time with you.

My pleasure. שלום וברכה. 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.