The Artistry Behind Every Bottle of Wine: A Conversation with Lewis Pasco

Welcome to The Kosher Teruah. I'm Simon Jacob, your host for this episode from Jerusalem. I reached out to my audience about whether it was proper or too insensitive to publish new episodes of The Kosher Teruah while our soldiers battle on the southern and northern border, and we have our hostages held in captivity by Hamas. I actually held off for the last week, but having received countless requests to continue, I am again publishing this, the latest Kosher Teruah episode. That said, I ask that each of you please pray for our soldiers' safe and speedy return home, and the rapid recovery of our hostages to their families. Today's episode of the Kosher Terroir is a conversation with an exceptionally talented winemaker, Louis Pascoe. Louis's career started early in life, moving from New Jersey to California and working his way up to chef in some of the most renowned restaurants in the San Francisco Bay Area. His food journey led to his interaction with and his love of wine and a master's degree in viticulture and enology from UC Davis. Louis has acquired an incredible depth of experience across wineries in California, from Napa through Sonoma, and has built credentials throughout the Israeli wine industry. Louis is now busy working with Eli Shor of Cormim Winery, building its new high-end Shore Estate brand. Please join me in this personally guided tour through winemaker Pascoe's storied life. If you're in the midst of a commute, enjoy. If you're home, grab a glass of your favorite kosher wine, sit back, and relax. Louis, um, thank you very much for agreeing to be on the Kosher Terroir. It's really a pleasure, and I'm really looking forward— you've got a bunch of bottles for us to taste, and I'm looking forward to tasting them.

First of all, it's my pleasure, Simon. I'm honored that you called me. I was a little surprised by your initial introduction, saying you thought maybe it was intimidating to call me. That's a little bit of a surprise, but Because you know people who I know.

Yep.

And a number of those people say that— a number, one of those people say that I was the reason they got involved in wine. That it was actually visiting the Recanati winery when I was the head winemaker and the half a day I spent with him, a long time, it was like a full half a day. Yep. Because of his level of interest. Yep. Actually got him into the wine industry, or was his motivation, or maybe the, maybe the last step. That I, I don't know, but he did give me that credit once. So that's Amichai. That's Amichai. He told me, he told me straight up that the day he spent with me got him so enthused about being a winemaker that that became his dream.

Very cool. Yeah, very cool. Tell me a little bit about these wines. That we're going to be tasting.

Okay, so the wines we're going to taste today are made in 3 different wineries. So there's a whole history lesson here.

Wow.

About me working through different places since I never built my own place. And the, the first wine was made with Bet-El.

Okay.

And they are the ones who really— I wouldn't say that they convinced me, But they are the ones who put an offer in front of me that was too good to turn down. I had left Israel after Rekanati for some time, and I wanted my kids to grow up perfectly bilingual, so we took them right at the age where they were entering grade school to the US. And after a few years there— That was basically 2009 to 2012. So, or 2008, 2009 for me till 2012, because I came back at the invitation of Beroel. I came back to work the harvest of 2012, which was an unbelievable harvest. So Hashem very much favored me on my return to Israel.

2012 was a great year.

Oh, fabulous year. Yeah, absolutely fabulous year. And but the offer Beryl made to me at that time was, look, we're too small, we don't have the money to pay you. They had an idea of where my status was, my salary at Recanati, uh, but they said you can live with us, you know, rent-free, come here. They knew I was in California. They'd come and I consulted to them. They brought me wines in California and I consulted to them a little bit before that. But they said, we really need you to come and sit in the harvest with us. So we've got room in our house. You know, the kids have grown up. They had a pretty good-sized house in Bedell. The winery's a walk from the house.

Right.

If you know the Manns, they're really nice people. I've known them for years and they're very nice. Hill is very intelligent. So is Nina. They're different ways. You know, Nina's more the publicist and marketing. And Hillel was a more introspective, thoughtful farmer/winemaker. Blah, blah, blah. They invited me back, said, live with us and we'll make wine. And you know, you have to pay for your own grapes. We're not paying for grapes or barrels or any of that. But otherwise, you know, we split the cost of the shmarrim. Basically, the production was free up to the cost of the materials cost and the bottling cost because they had a bottling line. Oh my, it was an offer I couldn't turn down. Plus, living in the— I had worked enough in the West Bank by that point to have a lot of faith in the soils and the terroir up in the West Bank. And I wasn't particularly afraid of it. You know, some people are very hesitant to go up to the West Bank. I didn't have that issue because, you know, why? Why? Faith in God? You know, a lot of people travel with a gun in the West Bank. I don't. I never did. You know, I just felt that my heart was pure. I hate Palestinians. I want them dead. I didn't want to take over the West Bank. As far as I was concerned, you know what? If I could hook up with Palestinians, have them grow grapes for me, okay, it would probably be Christians or Muslims who weren't religious. Have them grow grapes for me. I like the way they grow grapes, you know, blah, blah, blah. It's just, that's You know, obviously I was in a Jewish community, I was in Bet El and so forth, but, but I wanted to, to make wine there because I knew of the vineyard. This is really pre this explosion of vineyards in Shiro. Yeah, this was just the beginning. You're talking about 2012, you know, blah blah blah. It was too good of an offer to turn down, so I said, you know what, what the hell, I'll start my own label. I, I still had a reputation from Recanati even though it'd been 8 years since I'd been in the, in the wine— 8 years, no, 4 years, 5 years since I'd been involved in the Israeli wine industry. It had been that time. So that's where I started, and that's where this wine was made, the 2014 Pasco Project.

So this is the regular Pasco Project? Yeah, yeah, yeah, the 2014, which is, I think The one that I have, I think I have a 2014 Pasco Project.

Now, I haven't opened this recently, and I'll tell you, the bottles have not been well stored. This is not coming out of a special storage situation.

Okay.

Actually, they've been in my apartment for years. Now they're up here in my crash pad because I want them here for, uh, there's basically, they're strictly, uh, promotional wines. Yeah, right. I don't have enough to sell. So it's not like it's had, uh, really good— oh, it's faded. It's old but very nice tertiary, very nice tertiary characteristics.

It's actually lovely. And it's got—

it's, it's old, yeah, but it's a very good old.

Yeah, no, it's, it's, it's got, um, almost like a, uh, It's kind of a porty old, but not in a bad way, in a very, very good way. It's got a beautiful long finish.

Yeah, yeah, well, that's— I've always think that one of the hallmarks of my style in Israel, and when I came to Israel, I really had an idea about style because of where I worked in Napa, non-coastal wineries, where I've worked and gotten my education. and also because of my background as a chef. This is something that I don't talk about a lot, but if you follow my Facebook page, you'll see recipes every now and then, and you'll see some beautiful food pictures, you know. And I was a very, very good chef at a very early age. It's actually— I got bored with it. That's why I went to winemaking.

What's interesting to me is at the very beginning, when you were a chef, actually right after Columbia but before UC Davis, UC Berkeley and UC Davis. You were in this restaurant, and what intrigued me about it was that you mentioned that what started the whole style of that restaurant was the panna integrale that you used to make every day, and the smell used to permeate the restaurant, and that would make people hungry and like the restaurant to come into. And I'm sitting there going, wow, you've done a lot of homework. No, no, I, I saw that and I said Whoa, this guy's playing with yeast from the beginning. I mean, this is a—

It was the first time I was chef of a startup restaurant.

Right.

I had been pulled from— and it was actually a lower-level restaurant than where I'd been. Yeah. I'd been in a haute cuisine place, and this was more a trattoria, you would call it in Italian.

Yeah.

But the owner was a radio personality. So radio personality meaning he did food and wine— food reviews. He did restaurant reviews. On the radio. He, I think, had a once-a-week show on KGO in San Francisco. That's a major station, you know? So he had a fair listenership. And he expressed to me, when I interviewed with him, that he wanted a friendly place. He didn't want a hoity-toity place. He wanted a friendly place. And various ideas he had. Probably one of the things that got me hired, I mean, I know there were 2 or 3 things that got me hired. And one of the things was he came to my house and had a meal that I made for him at my house. And the minestrone that I made blew him off the doors. You know, why? Why? Because I started with a homemade chicken stock and everything was from the ground up. It was minestrone made like a top French chef is gonna make minestrone, not like maybe the typical Italian momma's gonna make it. Not that that's a bad thing. Anyway, as we sat and talked about the restaurant, and I said, you know, the kind of restaurant you want, you need to make your own bread. It's not that big a deal. You get it in the— I mean, I'd probably already seen the facility by then. Yeah, he really showed me what he had because he was taking over the lease of an existing place. They changed some of the equipment according to my specs, but I said, if you— if it's a small place, very small, and the kitchen's in the middle, there's some tables up in the front and some behind, but the kitchen's right in the middle. So even you got these, you know, typical restaurant fume hoods.

Yep.

The smell of what you're doing in the kitchen is all over the restaurant. Yes.

Yeah, but that's what you want.

Yes. With baking, you're cooking with half whole wheat, a really good, you know, San Francisco area whole wheat, that stone ground. I don't know if you lived in California, but LA—

I lived in the South.

So in the South, you might have seen this. I forget, I'm not remembering, but it was clearly whole wheat flour that was—

Ground.

Stone ground, you know, it wasn't fine, this and that. Probably never could have passed kosher restrictions because they have to pass through a very fine sieve for kosher flour. But it was a very earthy whole wheat. And you do regular flat white, pane di grano is one of the most common breads in Italy. Yeah, you know, and we made it in the very basic way— rounds, and then they rise up and putting it out hot on the table for the— it— we had a— not too many restaurants open up at 5 PM and, and get a full seating. It was, it was one of my proposals to him as a way, as a way to bring business into the restaurant. And at that time, again, you know, you're talking about then it was 1980 1982, '83, '85. '82. So '82, very few people were making their own bread. Yeah, I was San Francisco. Yeah, basically everybody gives you sourdough. Yeah, sourdough baguettes, you know, they're not expensive. You got 3 or 4 different proprietors. You can have real sourdough, or you can have Italian style, you know, not so sour. Yeah, but, but, but not sweet bread, but, but You know, crusty loaves, whatever. Every restaurant I'd worked in until then was buying from somebody else.

Yeah.

And I said, small place like this, you make your own.

It's a big deal because it really, I'm telling you, that smell is what kicks people's stomachs and also kicks their heads into gear properly. You know, when you're selling a house, the best thing you can do is before you show it, cook chocolate chip cookies. And, you know, like, and people walk in the house and they go, oh, this is a great house.

Yeah, that's an old rule of thumb.

Yes. So having, having something that smells but also tastes good is awesome. And it's not that expensive to do. It's just, it's just, it's expensive as far as some time is concerned.

There's time.

Yeah, there's time.

There's time involved. That's not something you put one of your chefs through. You should have a support guy in the kitchen that can crank out the, yeah, the can crank out that, then, you know, it's cool.

No, so that, that intrigued me about the beginning of, you know, like, they're already working with yeast, and I was wondering whether that kicked you into getting into, uh, the winemaking started before then. Okay, okay.

I was at 464 Magnolia. All right. Which was a very high-end, very imaginative, very creative very special restaurant in Marin County. And at the time that— want a little more of this or you want to try the next one?

We'll try the next one.

Okay.

But this is coming out. This is actually open. It's old but beautiful. Yeah, no, it's nice. You know, for being old, it doesn't have very much funk. It's just lovely.

Well, you shouldn't find funk in any of my wines.

Okay, okay.

I'm UCD.

Okay.

You know, there's a basic line that we have at UCD to me, a starting— it's the starting point.

Yeah.

Is that your wines are clean. Okay. And now the best wines I've made are not perfectly clean, right? But you learn to make clean wine, and then you step back in small steps to where you make basically clean wine, but wines that have incredibly interesting traits. And I think some people go in the other direction. I'm not going to mention names because I have a lot of opinions.

I don't think—

I don't say anything negative about anybody, right? But there's a lot of wineries that started in Israel making trash, the beginning of their wines. And I'm not talking about so much of the bigger places, they're going to start at some professional level. But some of these boutique guys, I mean, it's amazing they stayed in business after 3 years. But Then they got better. So, you know, they learned. But yeah, but what I get out of this 14th PASCO project now is just, it's just a fully mature, you know, uh, it means to me, and it's, look, first of all, the name, and this is my first BDX. The first one was PASCO Project Number 1 and PASCO Project Number 2. And then I said, you know, every, every year I got to resubmit the label and pay for approval. In— because I sell a lot of wine in the States. So I said, that's nuts.

But can I ask you, what's the BDX?

Bordeaux.

Okay, I love it.

It's, it's, it's a, a hint that we're making a Bordeaux style. And if you look at the grapes, it's mostly Bordelais grapes. I mean, the vast majority. I don't think I've ever put more than 10% of some grape that's not Bordeaux into it. So that means Cab Sauv, Merlot as the two big partners. Petit Verdot as a possibility, Cab Franc as a possibility, and then Petit Syrah, uh, on years that I, that I have that available. Blah blah blah. That's what BDX is. It stands for something in the style of Bordeaux.

Okay, I don't know why I didn't get that before, but it was— it's cool. It's, it's—

that is you something.

It makes sense.

Do you understand the label design?

Like a— what, like what you call it, a neasel?

Yes, yes. A lot of people don't get it.

Really? I always—

it surprises me too.

I always thought it was cool.

I, I, you know, putting— I've had people tell me, what is this, a table, a rocket ship? But I'm like, no, it's an easel, because I'm hoity enough to think I'm an artist, you know.

It's an artist putting it out there. That's, you know, whatever.

Not everybody gets it, believe me.

Not only is it an artist putting it out there, it's an artist putting it out there with his name on it. Which is like, you know, okay, you've got to have a certain—

You've got to sign your canvas, right?

Yeah, but a lot of people don't.

Yeah, it's chutzpah when it's this big.

I don't think, you know what, chutzpah is interesting. It's an interesting and very often a very positive character trait. Eli ben Zakayim, with his grand vin, that was an act of absolute awe. Chutzpah, but he, he did it.

But Eli very much aimed for a French style.

Yeah, yeah.

So doing something, you know, Château de Grand Vin, blah blah blah, it fits if you think you're making Bordeaux, and he is making Bordeaux 100%.

But the term Grand Vin is always, you know, is always associated with only the absolute best. And to start making wine and call it Grand Vin is like, uh, it's— you've got to have a certain amount of chutzpah to do it, but actually he pulled it off. Oh, it's the best.

More than pulled it off.

It's really great.

I mean, he's been an industry leader since day one, right? And, and in his own style.

Yeah, he didn't—

he didn't do what Ramada Golan did. I mean, Ramada Golan was, in terms of really good wines— and I don't mean to give a poop on anybody that was around before that. But in terms of, okay, I come from the international community of non-kosher.

Yes.

So my whole standard from the beginning is in a different place than the kosher consumer.

Right.

Until at least very recently. Okay, nowadays the kosher consumer is very sophisticated, or the higher end of the kosher consumer is very, very sophisticated and has kosher wines from top châteaus and this and that. You know, it's a very different world than even when I started in the kosher industry. Blah, blah, blah.

100%.

Okay, off on the topic of chutzpah. You like the label?

I like it a lot. I liked it from the very beginning.

I designed it myself pretty much.

I liked it from the very beginning.

Next one. Yes. I'll just continue with you. I'll fill your glass.

Yeah.

Now we're on the 16th. It just happens, A, we're skipping the Shmitah year, and B, it happens that 15 I had a lot of demand for. I don't know, it aged well or something, and I don't have any. I just simply don't have any. And because of the Shmitah business, I said, what am I going to keep this around for? Somebody wants to buy it, I'm selling it.

Right.

So I have zero bottles of 15. So not too long ago, some guy in Eilat who has two stores, one in Ramana, one in Eilat, He asked me if I have the '15 exactly. And at that time, I think I still had a few bottles. So I told him, you know, yeah, I got some. It's like, I have one case. He goes, okay, one case, what do you want for it? And I gave him a price. He's like, oh no, that's too much. And I go, do you expect me to sell it for—

next, next, goodbye, goodbye.

You're asking me for, you're asking me for the last 6 bottles in the world besides somebody's cellar.

Yep.

And now you want it at the price that it sold for when I released it?

Thanks. Those sort of people, I just look at and go, thanks very much, no problem.

Okay. Anyway, so the other— just the last thing about the '14. You liked it a lot. It's a really beautiful wine, blah blah blah. The long finish, which is you expect to gain as you, as you age. Does it, does it give you enough of a Bordeaux Does it merit the BDX term? Did you think it did? Or just do this one now and focus on that?

That's an interesting question. That is really, really an interesting question to me. I would have to say yes.

It's—

I don't know why I'm getting like kind of kind of almost a Spanish vibe out of it. And I don't know why, because it's not— it doesn't have Syrah in it or anything like that.

You're talking now about the '16? No, I'm talking about the '14.

I'm talking about the '14. I didn't taste the '16 yet, but it's, um, it's, it's, it's really, really lovely. It doesn't— you know, it's clean from— I'm expecting for wine that's that old, I'm expecting kind of the floor— I'm sorry, forest floor funk to it that's typically Bordeaux, and it doesn't have that. It's not funky. It's got— it's clean and it's lovely and it's mature. So that's the only thing that pushes me away from it being some sort of a French Bordeaux. Okay, okay, is that cool?

Now, let's— first of all, very cool. Okay, but tell me, as far as the funk is concerned, yeah, uh, the best wines of Bordeaux don't have funk. Okay, okay, Rothschild non-kosher doesn't have funk. Okay, it, it, it just doesn't. They actually make very, very clean wines at the top. In my experience, which is a lot, I've tasted a lot of Bordeaux at the top level. They're not funky. Okay. They do come in funky at the low levels.

I've only tasted kosher wines.

Yeah, no, and I'm not sure.

As an example, Pont-à-Canet, which is probably one of my favorite wines, the '03 Pont-à-Canet is, um, Pont-à-Canet is a nice solid Bordeaux, but that's, it's a nice solid Bordeaux.

It's not top shelf.

Okay.

I mean, there's, it's, it's I'm pretty sure— I don't have this as memorized as much as I used to. I used to know all of them, but I'm pretty sure it's Grand Cru Classé Bordeaux, but it's 5th growth. And by the way, Grand Cru Classé is just— that's high level already because they're, they're a Cru Bourgeois, which are terrific, right? You know, you have to know your château. It's usually up to the producer more and who might be working with that producer. And I, I I don't know who consults the Pontet-Canet. Bordeaux is different from America because they don't have winemakers.

Yeah.

They have cellar masters, and then the oenologue is often a consultant. So the real expert who's going to direct things is outside the winery. He's not sitting in the winery, typically, at least in history. You know what, maybe it's changed. No. Okay, so the '16, obviously it's younger. There's, there's more fruit here up front. Any funk there?

No, no, not— I'm not even getting the funk. I'm not getting any funk in here. Well, I don't think I'm getting any funk in this. I don't feel it. Um, there's tannins.

Yeah, it's clearly younger. There's, there's more tannin.

Yeah, but it's only a 2016. But it's— yes, it is.

Um, See, now I, I want to argue with you, and I don't want to seem as if I'm showing off my sensitivity. Please, to me there's funk here. Okay, it's very, very subtle, but it's clearly different from the '14. Yeah, there is a tint of earthiness. I could tell you the chemical, you know, there's a bit of H2S here. Okay, there's a teeny bit of hydrogen sulfide. Now it's very low level, but It's barely perceptible.

I can, I can, but when you tell me, yeah, and I taste for it, of course it's different.

The difference between, again, a Davis-trained winemaker and probably most winemakers, but to say Davis-trained winemaker is when we taste, the first thing we do is look at the flaws as, as a winemaker. Now, as a consumer, you look at the big picture. As, as, as a, as a winemaker, you look at the breakdown first. And only after you do all the breakdown, because it's the Davis scorecard, you know, the Davis scorecard, right?

Yeah, yeah.

What is a Davis scorecard? Yeah. You know, color, acidity, smell, you know, it's— I actually read, I have my own scorecard because I think they're a little bit too much on those technical details and they don't give enough points out of a 20-point score. They don't give enough to overall impression. And then for me, they don't give enough to aroma because I'm very aroma-driven. And that's the difference between me and everybody else. It's, it's my mom. She gave me an exceptional sense of smell. So now it's so faint, basically in 20 seconds of air it's just about gone.

Yeah, this is—

but it was— but for me there was right away this, ah, well, tiny bit of reduction. It's still there. It's still there.

This is lovely. This is really There's nothing wrong with this wine at all.

Even— and to me, we're talking about it's 2 years younger, it's fruitier, there's a bit of earth. There's a— there's a— I think there's a tremendous consistency between the 2014.

I was going to tell you that from the very beginning.

Okay, okay, good. I'm sorry, I put those words through the idea in your head. No, no, you didn't.

No, I didn't put it. When I tasted this, I said, wow, This is definitely a sister wine. These are siblings. It's just— this is just newer.

Yeah, yeah, basically it's, it's, it's a very, very similar wine.

And there's a similar blend.

Okay, yeah, they are. Okay, ah, I'd have to go back to book notes. They say the same thing. Okay, they say the exact same blend. That's certainly not true. That's a matter of label approval, right? That you don't, you don't want to go, you know, say, oh well, you know, I've got 5% more Cabernet Sauvignon here now, or 5% less, or whatever, and redo the label. It's just, there's a cost to it. So if you're close, and since it's not a variably labeled wine, right, you really no requirement to do that. You know, the legal requirement is actually the back label is the legal label, is, is, is, uh Dry red wine. Somewhere it should say dry red wine or something like that. Israeli dry red wine.

Okay.

No? Judean Hills. So it's, it's, uh—

So this is made in which winery?

The 2016 is then made in, uh, Bin Nun.

Okay, Bin Nun.

Wow. Yeah, I began a '15 at Bin Nun, partly because Beit El wasn't going to make Shmita wine.

Right.

And I didn't want to not make Shmita wines because the guy I was buying grapes from was a close personal friend.

Right.

16. We skipped over the 15.

Okay, let's try the next one.

Next one is 18.

Yeah, I'm keeping a little of the 16.

And this is again— and you're welcome to have more, by the way. Yeah, yeah, it's not like these wines have to be saved for this or that, you know. And now here you'll see a different blend.

Yeah, this is definitely different.

There's, besides the Cabernet, the 50%, instead of— it's just over 50%, it was 55, 56 previous labels. This is 51% Cabernet, Merlot 34, and then there's Cab Franc, Petit Verdot, and Petit Syrah. Okay, 6, 5, 4, but each one around 5% of those.

So it's, it's, it's It's still a Bordeaux blend.

Oh, it's still a Bordeaux blend. The only thing that's not Bordeaux in it is the Petit Syrah. Yeah, but the other 4 are all Bordeaux varieties.

This is still a sibling. Yeah, it's still— it's definitely a sibling.

It's changed maybe a little bit more. Yeah, but it's, it's— there is a common theme to the wines. Now I would say this, looking at them with an un-Jongdist eye. And I know that my goal is Bordeaux, but these are— they're not like Spanish or Italians, but they're, they're, there's something a little more Mediterranean about Bordeaux.

Yep.

And I guess, you know, you, you, it's like me, you can, you can take the kid out of the Bronx, but you can't take the Bronx out of the kid, right? You know, you can take the The style of winemaking and the barrels and everything can be things that are brought from somewhere else, but the grapes are grown in Israel.

Your family was from where originally? What's your background?

Russia, Poland.

Russia, Poland?

Yeah.

So how do you get Pasco?

Paskovich. Paskovich.

Okay.

Ellis Island, you know, they did a chop. Okay. Wow. Somebody put down the hammer there on the vitz.

Okay.

And just called the family Pascoe.

It was easier to write.

I suppose. There's a question of whether it's Vitch or Vitz, which is probably all the same spelling in the Cyrillic alphabet.

Yeah. Do you know where your family came from?

My brother keeps track of this stuff. I'm terrible with family history, but I'm pretty sure it's I believe at least a good part of the family is when you say Russia or Poland, it could be depending on the year.

Okay.

Right? Yes. Border towns. My brother used to mention Minsk. Maybe even Belarus. Maybe even White—

whatever.

White Russia. Maybe. I remember vaguely from stories of One of my great-grandparents, that one of my ancestors was a sailmaker for the Tsar. Wow. So there's skills in sewing.

Wow.

That's about the only really ancient thing I know about my family is that. That and— I think my grandparents were 3 out of the 4 born in Europe but came very young, very, very young.

To the US?

To the US, yeah. So they were born plus minus 1900, all of them. Right. And they were like here in 1904, you know, whatever, pre— well, pre-communist. They weren't leaving because of communism. They were leaving because of pogroms from the Tsar.

Here meaning America.

And hatred in Poland, just, you know, anti-Jewish sentiment in Poland has been ravaged for 1,000 years, whatever, for a long time. Somebody dropped something. Yep.

I've been hearing booms like that even in Jerusalem, but not for the last 2 days. Thank God.

Yeah, it's eased up a little bit, huh?

Jerusalem.

I have a good friend from the States who's been in Jerusalem, staying there. He comes regularly and he's going to move here. He's going to emigrate here eventually. David. Yeah, I thought you know him.

I knew you were going to say David. David. He was in my sukkah.

I knew you were connected somehow, you know, whatever, through internet conversations or something.

I know him from New York.

He's a great wine lover. And he's an investor here in a small vineyard.

Yeah, he's making— you're helping him make some wine. So please, God.

Anyway, pretty nice family resemblance.

Yes.

I don't think the '18 has the finish yet that the other two have. No, no. It hasn't evolved to that.

It doesn't, but I'm wondering where it's going.

But it's similar enough. When it ages a little bit more, it's going to get there.

I, yeah, I agree with you. It doesn't, it doesn't have the finish. It doesn't have the, the longer finish to it, but it's actually, um, yeah, let's see what happens.

It's a little less oaky. There's less new oak in this. I held my prices for a long time, and the dollar, by the time this was on the market, the dollar had devaluated against the shekel, and, and, you know, we were not making much money with overseas sales. So one of the answers to dealing with that was to just use older barrels, not to incorporate as many new barrels into the wine. So there's a little bit less oak, although I don't, you know, it's not such a huge difference.

You know, the, the '16 compared to this '18 is a little bit more saline, has a little touch of more salt to taste.

Saline is an interesting comment. Mm-hmm.

It could be that I was drinking it from the same glass as the others, but—

No, no, no. It's funny, I've had this comment before from educated palate people that say, "Your wines have a hair of saltiness to them." I'm like, "Hmm, I do." But I haven't done it in a long time. I used to use egg whites pretty regularly to soften up some of the tannins. And when you— I use fresh egg whites instead of commercially prepared stuff. Anyway, when you prepare the egg white solution for softening and clarifying, it's two functions, right? It can remove tannins and bitterness, some other polyphenols, and it clarifies. It helps to do less stages of filtration when you do fining. Now, eventually I pretty much dropped it out of my winemaking because I discovered in the end I'd rather do more filtration and not do the filtration. Done properly, doesn't affect the wine as much as the fining does. So, but anyway, I used to use it. Then you mix salt into the water when you do that, but the relative amount is so peanuts. Yeah, it's so small. I don't think that's it. Okay, I think Not sure. Anyway, I do think again, there's always the— now we're jumping 2 years, we're not doing year to year. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there's a little bit bigger jumps in the maturity, but I do think that it's just a little more in the Mediterranean vein and a little less in the Bordeaux style. This particular, The A-Team. It's, it's actually one of the nicest compliments I ever got from a professional critic when I was with Recanati. And I think it was, it was, uh, what's the festival that Haim Gann runs called? Terravino. Boom. Okay, Terravino. Anyway, at Terravino one year while I was still with Recanati, I don't remember which year, which year of Terravino it was, But I met a lady from America who went around tasting everywhere. And she's a wine writer and has a book. I think her book's called like The Idiot's Guide to Wine or something, or The Idiot's Guide to Wine Tasting. And she was really kind of neat. And she says to me, you know, you're Louis Pascal, you're the maker of these wines. She says, I have to tell you something about Rekanati as a whole here. There's a lot of good wines in this festival from Israel. I wasn't familiar with it. It's like her first visit to Israel. I wasn't familiar. There's a lot of good wines. 'But only your wines to me taste Mediterranean.' I understand it as a comment about Ramat Hagolan.

Yeah.

Because their wines are so Californian. You really, every single wine of Ramat Hagolan is like something made in California. From what I know. Okay.

It's your taste. Yes, I get it.

You know, and from my experience that that's California wines there. And the people who have advised them over the years, the people who's, you know, still the head winemaker. Victor is California-trained. He's Davis, just a little bit before me. I think we just missed each other, uh, even though he's a lot younger than me, but he went to school before me.

I didn't know that. I didn't know he was younger.

Well, Victor's definitely younger than me. Okay, okay. Yeah, I came here when I was 40 years old. I didn't come here that much after Victor because '97— I don't— Victor came a little bit before me.

Yeah.

Their American advisor said, how did you come to Israel and I miss you? You know, because I had actually two friends as Victor's assistant winemakers. When I came to America, he had two assistant winemakers who were people I knew from the States.

Wow.

You know, one of them wasn't even Jewish. Right. But, you know, blah, blah, blah. Last one.

Yeah, I'm gonna finish this. You drink it, go ahead, you use that one.

Well, I've got other glasses, don't worry about that. I gave myself another glass. You can have a new glass so you can try to keep a few of them together.

Yeah, that's what I'm trying to— This is the 2020.

And now we come to the current release. This is what's on the market right now.

Okay.

That's a '19.

That's a '19.

It's— but the '19 is unopened. I did this partly because we're doing through the series of every 2 years, so it's nice to keep that consistent.

Right. You have family here and kids here?

My wife, my one daughter is here, a stepdaughter is here. I have another daughter now that's in New York. But she just left a couple months ago. And she's not there permanently. She's coming back. At least I hope she's not there permanently. Still in the, in the, in the wine, in the same, the same style of wine continuing. Speak highly about, I mean, Eli Benzacan and I are friends for 1,000 years.

Yeah.

You know, he— I wasn't here, I don't know how long, a few years that we first personally met at a tasting. And Eli right away commented to me about a technical issue that he was having difficulties with. I mean, I had that kind of respect and people never even met me, right? No, they knew I was from Davis, whatever. He was making a mistake in his processing, you know. It's just something that he didn't understand. He didn't understand, his cellar master didn't understand, whoever was actually hands-on doing some of the work involving wine chemistry. Didn't understand something. And I corrected him. I said, oh, you can't do that. You know, you said, I understand why you're doing it because you said it's a matter of how you add bisulfite. And I corrected him. I said, no, that's, you're not getting the results that you think because you're doing something wrong and this is what you should do. He said, you know, oh, oh, really? Oh, it's like, okay, there's little things. Again, you come out of Davis, you're very technically prepare. You know, where you need to grow is actually what you do and your vision and your artisticness, you know, because you're— what you're trained to do is to make clean, correct wines.

Right.

But that's not winemaking. And Davis will tell you, we're not telling you how to make wine. You're telling me how to functionally process the materials to have a commercial product.

Right.

But making wine is something you've learned in the field.

Yes.

And they'll tell you that right off the bat, which is back in the day we heard stories about how Davis has a style of this and that and the other thing. I myself, now he loved food, so I came in from the food angle. And I, we started to talk about this a little bit earlier, but I'll go back to it now.

Please.

When I was at 464 Magnolia, The owner recognized my palate very quickly, that I had an exceptional palate. So on my days off, which was Sunday, Monday, he would like to himself take me to the wineries. So we, and we had a wonderful wine list. You get introduced to wines in a restaurant, especially Northern California. It's just, there are very few places where you get introduced to wines like that. New York is similar because there's everything from everywhere comes to New York City, but it's not next, it's next to Long Island, you know, which to me, the wines of Long Island, I could—

They're coming.

You know, whatever.

They're coming, they're coming.

Maybe they're better now. Look, I was friends with the, who's like the first people to make a notable winery on Long Island.

Right, up in, what's it called, not Orchard?

Page—

what?

It's a very famous couple. They got written up a lot. They had a very interesting label. They had a laser-cut label with a wine trellis and a lattice on it. I can't remember who that— I think they're out of the business now. I don't know, maybe somebody still runs the winery. But I've been through Long Island and tasted the wines. There's some nice stuff there, but it's like nothing compared to California in terms of quality, in terms of range and diversity. Upstate New York is different because you have different kinds of varieties. They could do the, you know, the Rieslings at a very high level.

They are, but California had incredible creativity among its winemakers. They were just crazy.

Anyway, with this guy, 464 Magnolia, he would take me on my days off. We would go together and visit the wine country, and we'd go into wineries and taste from guys that you just don't see You know, their wines don't make it to New York. They're not big enough. They're too small and they can sell everything. Basically, it doesn't get outside of the San Francisco Bay Area. There's enough market in the San Francisco Bay. I'm talking about Enrico Raffanelli, okay? He's one of my first teachers of making wine, even though at that point I had no idea I was going to be a winemaker. We'd sit and, you know, we'd talk about, you know, how do you decide when to pick your grapes? So the grapes, he says, chemistry is chemistry. I taste the grapes.

I taste the grapes and look at the seeds.

Bidjouk!

Look at the coating around the seeds.

How easy does the berry come off?

Come off, right.

It's basically like you went into a wild blackberry patch and you want to pick what you want to eat right now.

You know how I learned that? I learned that from a winemaker who took me into the— what you call it— into the field, and he said, look, this is not ready yet. You can see everything is stuck together still.

Yeah, okay, the grape, the berry doesn't come off from that. It doesn't dehis, is the correct word. It doesn't dehis from the peduncle. The flesh around the berry is very, around the seed is very stuck to it. Very tough still. The seed has not gotten completely brown yet. These are all the things that you go out in the field.

And you learn from experience.

When I first came here to teach me, And I started to pay attention to this. The people that— you know, these people in Israel, I've never seen a winemaker spend so much time in the field. You're like in the field all the time during harvest. How do you do your work? And oh my God, let's go. If I make the right decision here, if I pick the grape at the right time, the rest is pretty much easy. My reputation started to get around about the way I was spending time in the field. Now I have to jump back to about going with the wineries. So I was learning winemaking by tasting, and the range of tasting was incredible. Even before that, one night I was in a place called the Big Four restaurant in the Huntington Hotel, and I wasn't a chef there. I became a chef later at 464 Magnolia Marin. In the Big Four, the Huntington Hotel, I was responsible for employee meals. You make something different for employees from the regular meal. However, it got to be known that if you came back with something really interesting in the bottom of a wine bottle that a table hadn't finished— and Huntington, a very exclusive hotel, these are very wealthy customers, so they're not like putting a cork and taking their last fourth of Lafite Lafite. Rothschild, 10 years old, they're not taking that home with them. So normally the waiters would drink it, but they learned, well, I could drink this or I could bring it to Louis and maybe somehow an extra filet mignon comes out on a plate for my employee dinner. I'm exaggerating. I don't think I ever gave anybody filet mignons, but I was the grill cook. So I ended up in 1980 drinking a 1970 Lafite Rothschild. 70s, a very good vintage. I don't know if it's the top 10 in the 1900s, but top 20 for sure. It might be even top 10, you know.

Wasn't '85—

'85 was great, but I don't think '85— I think actually '86 was better than '85.

'86, I was going to say.

'86, I think, was a hair better, right? Uh, '75 was very good. '70, '75.

So this was what year?

'61. And I sat I had— I sat with a range of '61s once, okay, when I was in the wine business and I was just an apprentice in the wine business at Hess Collection. They had a '61 Bordeaux tasting and they invited me to taste with them. Getting back to this, I was in the restaurant business and a 10-year-old bottle of Lafite Rothschild came to me. And I was like, at that time I was busy in the books. I always— Simple French Food is my Bible of cooking, and there's a lot about tasting in that book. If you've never read that book, I could recommend food books to you to read, even though of course it's not kosher. It just talks about principles and herbs, and there's a lot to learn that you can easily apply to kosher cooking in Simple French Food. And I was, at that time I was looking at the book called The Saucier's Apprentice by Raymond Sokolov, and I was figuring out creating sauces because that was my, I was the group cook and the saucier. And I had this Lafite Rothschild, 10 years old, and I'm like, you know, you get this into your mouth, you smell it, it's touching in hitting every part of your mouth and your nose. It's like there's no one— you talk about now, they just— I just read, just read an article about there's an 8th taste, a 7th taste, whatever, that they— there's something past umami. There's a new one now that they say really exists, food scientists. Never mind. At that time, I had never tasted a wine I had never tasted a great wine. Not a good wine, a great wine. And I'm like, what is this? What's different about it? It hits everything. There's no part of your palate which isn't touched somehow, your palate and your sense of smell. It touches every single part, but in perfect harmony. There's no one thing that's out of whack. It's all so damn balanced. You know, when you break down what are those things from a chef's point of view, there's sweet or fruit, there's acid balance. And acid balance is somewhere I'm very ludnik compared to a lot of other winemakers. If you put another vertical series of somebody else versus mine, one of the first things you'll find is mine are more acid, you know. Not overly acid like underripe grapes because they're 20 ripe grapes, you know. That's not the issue. Okay, this is In every case, it's fixed acidity, okay? It's corrected. This is Davis winemaking, and it's Israel. You, you, very few, some of the newer varieties people are working with might give you, like, Marsala, might have enough acid that you don't need to play with it. But basically, all this blah, blah, blah, natural, I don't, nonsense. You need to fix it. You're in there, you're the chef. You're the chef of a winery. If you can improve what nature gives you, You improve it. You don't hold on your high horse of, I don't want to add tartaric acid, or I can't, you know.

Well, there are people who are like that. There are people who are like that.

There are people like that, and they're basically not making the best wine they can make. I'll tell you that point blank.

I get you. I get you 100%. They feel like the job is in the vineyard, and at the end, all they're trying to do is get to—

They're right. 90% of the job isn't the minute, but that other 10% matters.

You could leave it off, but yeah, it's not going to be— it's not going to be—

you— the point is you could make it better.

Yes, 100%.

Okay, the point is you could make it better, and, and probably you're leaving it off maybe because of some philosophical reason, but more likely it's a marketing ploy, right? And half the time they're lying to you. They say they don't and they do. That's the— that's the other point, that what people say and what they do It's two different things. Yeah, it's been that way 100 years in the wine industry. Okay, it's nothing new. You know, when Bordeaux didn't get ripe grapes, they didn't bring Syrah from the Rhône. You know, I mean, it's really Burgundy, which is more of a problem of getting ripe. Well, yes and no, more of a problem than Bordeaux. But again, if you didn't get ripe grapes, you didn't go to another part of France and ship up some grapes to get ripeness. They probably didn't add sugar, or actually they did add sugar, right? They added beet sugar. They have their rules about sugar. Nowadays it's different. Nowadays you don't need to do that. Why? Because you have concentrators. All the best wineries in France have concentrators. They actually manipulate the grapes with concentrators. You know, there's all kinds of— where did I go? I'm jumping around. And I do that.

No, it's okay.

But Lafite Rothschild? Yes. It's just such a perfect wine. It changed the way I cooked. Okay, how did it change the way I cook? Now when I made a sauce, whatever the recipe, I put a squeeze of lemon juice into fettuccine Alfredo. Nobody does this except me.

Yeah, right.

Okay?

I was gonna say, wow.

This is— I can't believe it. Because you have to balance the acidity. All that fat, all that cream, all that cheese. And cheese has some acid, you know, don't, don't, let's not kid ourselves. Aged Parmesan cheese has an acid kick. But for my taste, it needs a teeny bit of lemon juice. And I cooked Riera's with the bread. People went crazy for them. They went crazy for all my food. And we were a 50-seat restaurant that did at least 100 dinners every night. And would do 150 on weekends, 3 full turns. And there's laws about how late you could be open in Berkeley. You know, it was very specific. We were not far from residential neighborhoods. We had to officially close at 10, which I— it made— we could seat people until 10. So the restaurant would be open till 11, 11:30 maybe. But I think wine has always been more than a lot of fields, a community. A community project. Now, I'll say this, in my experience, and it's partly limited by the fact that I've never mastered Hebrew, but my experience, it was much more a community project in California than it is in Israel. Or now, I don't know, there have been some tasting groups and some winemakers get together and this and that, but in California We took what we did at Davis as a class, you know, it was like 2 classes worth, but more or less it was 1 class. And in my case, it was master's students. And we continued the tastings we started. It was once a week or once every 2 weeks in Davis as our own project. We continued them as we got out into the professional world. And we would sit there and take You know, it's also, it's California. There's a gazillion wines on the shelf. And a lot of us were making, all of us were making wine somewhere or another. So our tastings were very organized. It was one vintage, one variety typically, or if it was a blend, it was, you know, maricages, you know. We'd have 8 wines, maybe 10, but we wouldn't try to do more than 10, which meant 8 people showing up at the tasting. We'd each bring a bottle. Each one of us would have our own set of glass. We'd have all 8 glasses so we could taste all the wines simultaneously, Davis style. We do 20-point scorecard tastings. And we'd rate the wines. And we continued this practice for years. And that was the most basic of the groups I was in. There was much more advanced groups that worked on experiments at wineries and did all kinds of things that were— but there was this cooperation among winemakers to learn together. That we're all going to teach each other together what's good, what's bad, what's out. I was— again, sounds like bragging a little bit, but I was a little bit ahead of the curve because of my restaurant background. I was older, I had a restaurant background, I knew some things. So when a wine might come in a tasting of Zinfandels, and it was— oh, I'm not going to mention names— it was wines by some very famous, highly celebrated winemakers. And what's interesting about it is it's a little bit mirrored in Israel today. Anyway, and they would make these Zinfandels up at 15.5% alcohol, 16% alcohol, and they'd win the point score tasting. And I would be the only voice in the room that said, that's not going to age well, that alcohol is going to overwhelm the fruit at some point, and it's not going to be a good wine.

And now, sell well right now, Yes, but this isn't something you want to put in your cellar anyway.

Robert Parker, who was the one of the people who made this particular winemaker very famous, right, about 5, 10 years later, he did a review of how the wines aged. His opinion was the same as mine. They didn't hold up. They weren't wines that aged really well. That a little bit lower alcohol wines tended to age better. And there's a number of reasons. It's not the only— the alcohol being out of balance, it's other things. I've done things that I don't think anybody else in Israel has done because they haven't had my experience and been at the premium wineries in California and had this opportunity. I've done highly manipulated wines in California. An example would be a Sauvignon Blanc I made at a particular winery.

Wow, that sounds so white.

Here's what I did. I looked at the vineyards, I tasted the wines that had been made previously from the vineyard, And sat down. I was the assistant winemaker, but I was in charge of the winemaking. The winemaker was over— and he knew my palate, and he very much trusted me. I mean, my interview, and at one point he gave me back vintages of his wines that he'd made. And I said to him, I mean, these are nice wines, but they're not California Cabernets. And he said, Louis, you have a way of talking, you really hurt me. You know, and I said, I'm sorry, Doug. Sorry, Doug. You would have to dig very deep in my history to figure out who I'm talking to. I said, sorry, Doug, but this is the way I feel. You're sitting here in Stag's Leap District with the best Cabernet on every side of you. I mean, Stag's Leap Cabernets.

I used to have Stag's Leap.

Okay. I'm not talking now about Stag's Leap Winery or Stag's Leap Vineyard.

No, no, I know.

But the area.

No, no, I know exactly.

The AOC or whatever it's called.

Yeah, whatever they call it.

Appalachian. Yeah, Appalachian. There's remarkable— they're just—

I've smelled unbelievable wines. I just haven't drunk them.

No, no, no. Uh, the last time I had a Stag's Leap— well, maybe for my cellar I have had one, I forget— but the last time I had one in Israel was Rudy Shaked had imported the, uh— ah, how did the name just go in and out of my head? One of the best producers over there. Oh, I just had the name in my head, now it went out of my head. Anyway, the name doesn't say Stag's Leap or anything like that in it, but they have a Stag's Leap Cabernet.

They make a kosher cab from Stag's Leap now.

Ernie makes one?

No, it's not Ernie, it's what you call it, it's from Herzog.

Oh, from Herzog. Oh, I, I never had their Stag's Leap, but they're Alexander Valley, yeah, Chalk Hill. They're Chalk Hillers. Oh man. They do a wonderful job with those charcoals. Those are superb.

But the Stag's Leap that they came out with, I had to buy a bottle of it only because I'd stored so much of it for my father and never tasted it. I just desperately— so I have some. We could share a bottle.

Okay, but there were 4 restaurants in the San Francisco Bay Area which probably were, I don't know, in newness of what they did and something a little bit different and unique. They were probably the 4 best restaurants in the entire United States. I mean, you had your classic New York French places. Yeah, that were, you know, but they were French. Yes, there was nothing American about them. But there was also Michael's in LA at that time. Creativity.

No, the difference is the creativity was coming out of that part of the world, and there's a reason it was crazy.

There's a reason you go to San Francisco, you, you, you You come into San Jose and you look at the bay, it's a unique physical set of places. The fish, the seafood, okay, not for kosher, but the seafood, fish, the mushrooms that are there. It's, you know, because I was a chef, I was taught by one of the expert mushroom hunters. I've probably eaten 15 different types of wild mushrooms and I pick all of them myself, okay? That's, again, it's rare knowledge. I was such a good chef that other people who had other expertises in the food industry used to bring me in. At 464 Magnolia, we worked with tomatoes out of somebody's garden. Blah, blah, blah. I had these experiences being lucky. 464 Magnolia, we got fish flown in from Hawaii that was still in rigor mortis. You know the window for rigor mortis?

I know, I know.

It doesn't happen— fish doesn't enter rigor mortis until 12 hours, and it goes out of rigor mortis after 48.

Yeah.

You never see fish in rigor mortis commercially, so it's always older than 48 hours.

Yeah.

Okay, you can fish and you won't see rigor mortis then either because you cook it right away and it won't be in rigor mortis yet. We got fish in rigor mortis from Hawaii. Pompano. I just, I worked with ingredients that were, as a chef, that were so good it gave me an idea of what I should be looking for in grapes. In Israel, that's tough. You don't see that kind of growing too much in Israel, you know.

I think that there are some winemakers who would sit with you and do tastings the way you're talking about with Davis. There's some that are really capable and that would love to share.

I think there's a group that does it now.

Yeah, there are some.

I wasn't invited initially, and this is going back a few years. I knew a group that started a long time ago, and it's in Hebrew also. So here I am going to talk in English. I'm not going to get what they're saying too much. I'm getting a little bit better finally. With understanding. I mean, finally, when I am on Waze, I leave it in Hebrew. Don't change it to English. Who would you think I would want to taste with?

There's a few. There's a few people.

Give me some names.

Yaakov Voria.

Yaakov and I are very good friends.

I know.

We've tasted wines. When a personal friend would come and I'd give them a tour of wineries, this is back when Yaakov was down in the Midbar. Maybe he's back there now.

He is now in Pinto. Right.

When Yaakov was there, that would be like one of the first— where would I take people? And A, I have access back then anyway, because I've lost some of my cachet over the years, I guess. But back then, I could go anywhere and get a tasting with a winemaker. Right. You know, it wasn't like, oh, Louis Pascoe's coming and bringing a guest. I didn't get the hospitality staff. Right. I got the winemaker to sit with us for an hour or two. That's why a friend of mine said to me, after recognizing, he said, I'm not sure what I'm going to do. He says, become a tour guide, man. You'd be like the most upscale tour guide in the world. Blah, blah, blah. We go to Yaakov. We'd go to—

You know who else I would suggest?

We'd go to what's his name, Adyatir. We'd go to him. And again, I've never actually— You went to Adyatir? No, you didn't get to sit with him.

I didn't sit with him.

If you came with me, you would have sat with him.

I sat with Yaakov and Eti.

Okay.

And they were wonderful, and they were really super, and I loved every minute of it. I didn't get to sit with him, but one of the other people I would tell you to actually sit with, who's a really interesting winemaker, who would be challenged by you as well, and also is Asaf Paz from Asafanay.

Know each other extremely well. He followed me at Tishbe. I don't know if you know my— it wasn't immediately with Tishbe. There was a French guy that came in for 2 years, Jerome Sabatier. Yeah. And Asaf came to Tishbe for 1 year and left. Very few people could stay working with Tishbe. It is too challenging an environment. I was there 3 years and I turned the winery around. They did nice white wines. I mean, nice, not great. They did nice white wines and bad red wines when I arrived. And when I left, they were making great red wines and white wines that were winning awards and white wines that were written up as, you know, some or another critic's choice as the wine to drink for Yom HaTzmaut, you know, and compared to the best wines in the world, actually. You know, that's Avi Edgar, recently passed. He wrote Sauvignon Blanc I Made at Tishbi. The article called Blue White Blue. And he said he drank a Cloudy Bay. He's not a kosher keeper at all. Drank a Cloudy Bay in an Israeli Tel Aviv restaurant. Said, wow, what a great sight. Didn't want to spend, they wanted another bottle. He didn't want to spend that much. He ordered a Tisby. The staff, I think, recommended to him. Tisby Sauvignon Blanc. He's like, this tastes just like Cloudy Bay. And I'm like, yeah, I had just come. That was my first year in Israel. I had just come from America. I learned under an Australian. Whose brother was a winemaker in New Zealand, right? So I mean, yeah, naturally I made New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc. I started to tell you a story. There's things that I have in my experience. In Napa winery, I was given the reins to make the wines after I got the job by somewhat insulting the winemaker on the quality of his previous stuff. And He said, you know, look, I'm going to hand over basically the winemaking to you. So, so, I didn't like certain aspects about it and the way the vineyard was and this and that. And I'm like, do you mind if we do this? And it was, this was my program. We're going to pick it overripe because that's the only way it gets the flavor that I like, because it was a high-yield vineyard for Napa. By Israeli standards, it wouldn't even have been that high yield. But I'm going to pick it overripe. We're going to acidify it. We're going to dealcoholize it. And then we're going to bottle it. So you're talking about a highly manipulated product. Yeah. Right?

It's 100% natural.

It comes out. It gets the best score by far from Robert Parker that he's ever given to their particular white wine, Sauvignon Blanc. The best score he's ever gotten. And it's like, his wine is like, finally they do something right. Now, Robert Parker, if he knew it was manipulated, he would have shat all over the wine. Yeah, but I knew from my Davis background that this is kind of what these grapes needed. It's not like I would do that if they had perfect Sauvignon Blanc grapes, but he didn't. It tells me there was— hey, there's not the ability to over-manipulate like that. If you tried to get grapes overripe in the first place, they'd be red. Rotten before you could get them to overripe. In Tishbe, the Sauvignon Blanc was the Sauvignon Blanc. I did the most basic kind of New Zealand techniques to preserve the fruit, and we made a Sauvignon Blanc that smelled like guava. Wow. My last wine at Recanati that went to the bottle that was made by me was the first Recanati Reserve Sauvignon Blanc. 25, 20, 25, 30 journalists at a party, you know, it's Recanati, right? And, uh, Port Sauvignon Blanc. And I, I think it was better than Cloudy Bay. I, I just— I remember making this wine and I'm like, we're pouring it and I'm talking to the journalists, running around the room. I can smell from the next table, 2, 3 meters away, when somebody opens a bottle and pours it. I'm smelling what's going on in that glass and I'm like Nobody makes Sauvignon Blanc like that in Israel except for me. There's people who come close, but again, I have a very specific recipe and I know where the grapes should be harvested to achieve that result. And, you know, Tisbe, the first time it came to me, it was really a lot of luck, you know. This is when the grapes had to be picked because they were starting to get rotten and da da da. But the technique of the winemaking was very Bidouk New Zealand. Anyway.

That's why I would really like to taste more whites out of you.

I don't have the grapes right now. Thank you for letting me pour for you. I didn't even think about it. No, Louis, you're Jewish. First of all, yeah, 100%. You know what he said the first time I said something about fakakta? He said, now I believe you're Jewish. When I muttered some curses in Yiddish, not something, Jonathan's a great guy. I don't know if you ever met Jonathan. Jonathan's a terrific guy, terrific old man, and he brought me here.

Did you ever speak to— did you ever speak to Israel Flam?

Of course.

Yeah, because he's also— isn't he a UC Davis guy?

Yeah, he's a Davis guy. He's a Davis guy. Did you ever say it? No, somebody else would tell— somebody recently told me something about one of the first wines that Flam made at Carmel, a higher level. Was it you? It's okay. That it was just remarkable, you know. And Farm's comment to me was, every now and then I get a chance to make wine at Carmel. Carmel, you know, two vintages after my first contract with Recanati. Yeah, it was a 3-year contract, so it was 2000, 2001, 2002. So right at the time, talking about a guy that getting lucky in the business, right at the time that contract was ending, you know, because that was a set salary adjusted for whatever inflation of that. But you know, there wasn't— I don't think there was a raise built into it year to year. It was just inflation adjusted. Anyway, for 3 years I had the same salary. Uh, as it ended, the 2001 It must have been, maybe it was a 3. Somehow we're negotiating and I won the Best of Bordeaux Award with the 2001 Special Reserve. Now, this is Shmita year. Right? How did I end up? Because, and Recanati's really good vineyards that they planted at the time, they didn't come on until, even vineyards that had been planted that they just snagged the contract, I didn't start getting those grapes till 2003. So what did I do 2000, 2001, 2002? Well, the grapes were kind of dicey, a lot of them. But in 2001, being a Shmita year, Alex over at Daltón says, you know what, how many grapes do you want? You know, he said, we're interested about that. I think we took, it was more than 50 tons, like 100 tons from Daltón. He cut his production way, way down. And he said, I'll give you, you know, And this is a common way, in my experience in California, is a common way when you start to negotiate like this and somebody wants to move a lot of grapes to you, they give you a choice. They say, go look at 10 vineyard blocks, pick 5 of them, or pick, pick what you want from these groups of vineyards of what you want. So obviously they keep what they think is their very best stuff to themselves, but the next tier you get to, you get to look. And maybe I got a set of eyes to see something in this tier that they don't see. Okay? In particular with Dautan, it was north-facing slopes. Because Israel, the sun is too strong on west and south-facing slopes. So the opposite of when you're on the Moselle and the Rhine and you want only south-facing slopes, in Israel you can get more character with north-facing slopes. Now here I'm giving away information that really should be proprietary to me and nobody else should know this. I mean, people might figure it out for themselves.

Yeah.

But, but And it's for the style of wine that I like, which is in a more complex style. I don't want only ripe flavors. I want other flavors. Anyway, we had north-facing slopes. So yeah, a lot of Benzema, you know, 800-meter-high stuff on a north-facing slope, and the vines look good, and I'm like, yeah, I want this block. And this block, which we had a lot of this block, wasn't even all that, but part of this block was pretty big block. Went and made the 2001 Recanati Special Reserve. Now I don't know if you ever had that, it's a shmika wine, maybe you never would have tasted it, but it was a breakthrough wine for Israel probably. It was good on the level of Ramat Hagolan wine and Eli Benzacain wine, but it was different. It just wasn't the same as anybody else's wine. And that's because, and actually I've never made another wine like it. Cabernet can have a green character. It's part of the desirable character to some people in Ramada. They don't like the taste and they do everything they can viticulture to get rid of it, to get rid of it. Although they've maybe changed a little bit recently because now they're growing Cabernet Franc and actually bottling Cabernet Franc. When I first met Victor, he's like, I hate Cabernet Franc. And I'm like, ah, but I said, yeah, you should think about it because it really works in the mountains. This is experience from California. The Cabernet Franc doesn't do well in the Napa Valley, but you get up to the mountains, Amador County, and this and that, where they— everybody thinks they're going to grow Zinfandel and Syrah and this and that, and Cabernet Franc suddenly is way better than Cabernet and Merlot. Yeah, I don't know why, it just is. It has certain growth characteristics. Anyway, I said, I think you're wrong about Cabernet Franc, I think it really works. This was Cabernet Sauvignon but had a little bit of Cabernet Franc character of green. And beyond that, green is— the most classic green is a kind of bell pepper. In truth, and really sensorially, it's very, very difficult to— impossible to really differentiate different kinds of green. We all think we can, but when you study it in a group, it's what everybody can agree on. What's real is what a group of people who are trained can agree on. It's just green. It's just herbal. In this case, though, the herbal was mint. It was nana. And I was like, well, like, what wine smells like nana? And it won the, you know, went to Vinexpo Bordeaux competition, Citadel it's called, and it won the trophy as the best wine of Israel. Wow. So that comes out of the 2001. And then it's a very interesting wine. 'Cause Spectator hated it. Wine Spectator gave it a terrible, like a flawed wine score. And all they said was thin and acidic. Now, for the life of me, I've tasted with people from The Spectator. It's not like they're idiots and don't know what they're tasting. But I know enough about tasting, and again, my lab work at Davis, my master's thesis, was partly viticultural and partly tasting. It was like split 50/50. I kind of understood immediately what happened, because when you're really a winemaker, when you're really into the business, not just— even the best of critics don't quite get this, or they don't admit it to themselves, or whatever. Your own palate changes time to time. The same wine won't taste the same to you on night— you drink it 3 nights in a row, and it's very rare that it'll taste the same to you those 3 nights in a row because of changes in you, not because of bottle variation. Because how our palates change. Anyway, it's very subjective. What happened, what happened in this tasting that this wine got such a panning from The Spectator, it was probably grouped with a bunch of Cali— uh, with a bunch of Israeli reds, and it was less ripe. It came across as thin and acidic to them. If you put it in a Bordeaux tasting like it was— it wasn't in a Bordeaux, it was still with Israeli wines, right? But it was tasted by people from Bordeaux. Winemakers, professors, this and that in Bordeaux, in Vinexpo. And they're like, hell, this is a terrific wine. These other wines are heavy and clumsy. You're different. It's jumping out because it's different. So in Spectator, where it was with a bunch of— maybe Ramana Golan and who else from Israel that they for sure had— and it was less alcoholic, less ripe, less dark in color, more acid. For them, it was awful. But for the French, it was the best wine of Israel, that harvest. And to us all, it was like, in the winery, we all knew it was terrific because it was, A, it just smelled, and it was like the mint smell was just, you know, like, again, it was just, that's the grapes. I know there's nothing, that's not a manipulation, that's just grapes and harvesting them at the right time. Like I said, north-facing slope. Not too much sun on them, but, but somewhat exposed. They weren't like— it wasn't a vigorous vineyard that was, that was overly leafy. Uh, it's a good, uh, I, I, I just was a little bit upset with Greg and I that they didn't take the marketing opportunity, you know, because Spectator is known to have a little bit of a preference for people who use their advertising space. Yeah, so I'm like, take a quarter-page ad and put Wine Spectator 80 points, terrible, you know, horrible rating and all that. Vinexpo Bordeaux, best wine of Israel, you know. You decide, try a bottle and you decide. You know, we were very reasonably priced for a high-end wine, whatever. We were very conscious to be— we didn't try to price it at El Rom, or, you know, whatever the competition was at that level. El Rom and what's that, Katsourine? Yeah, we didn't price it at that level. We priced it a notch down more. It was more expensive than a Yardin, regular Yardin, but in between. It didn't, it didn't approach the, the, uh, the upper level of their pricing. So you want to taste anything else?

You know what, I just want to taste the 21 more time. I want to go over with you The reason I brought the '19 was—

now, now you see a shift in the wineries. It's a funky bottle from the '19, but it is a '19. It's just got two black labels. Uh, that was made at Ben Nun. That's my last wine at Ben Nun, and this is my first one working with Eli.

This is the first one from Eli.

This is the '20. Yeah, that's 20 BDX. This is a slight— I don't know if you notice it, there's a slight change in the label design. Yep.

See, it's a little short. Yeah, it's a little bit bigger.

It's a different color foil.

Yeah.

Is that obvious?

Yeah.

This is not obvious, but this is the color I wanted from the beginning, right? And they didn't have it, so I went with silver and then stayed with silver. But he finally got it in. Stock at the time that I needed my labels, and I'm like, that's the color I want. It's, it's pewter, you know, it's a darker gray, you know. And then the idea is to make Pasco Project more of a label in itself so I can do different Pasco Projects. Here it was just one wine all the time, Pasco Projects. But here, Pasco Project, there's BDX and there's others. Yeah, as well. Like I have a Marsala-based one that I call Winemaker's Blend. I'm not crazy about the Winemaker's Blend name, but that's what my importer wanted. And Marsala is wonderful for Israel. It is. It's a great grape for our climate. I mentioned that I have no hesitation about using acid to manipulate things. Marsala doesn't need it, I don't think. It's got naturally high acid for our climate. Anyway, I wanted to— at the same time, I'm emphasizing both the Pasco project and the BDX, making that more clear. And it's still obviously the Louis Pascoe logo is still huge and gigantic and all that. That's okay.

No, it's great.

Downgraded that. Anyway, I— this one is interesting. If you want to taste it, the '19, because it's my last wine with Bennoon. And what to me what's interesting about it is I actually think it's less ready to drink than the '20 is. I think it's more hard And I tell people that, I mean, people who buy from me privately, who know what they're drinking, who buy from me privately, which I have a few clients like that. You know, one guy used to write for Gourmet and he was head of the, head of the, what's it called? Anyway, some hoity-toity European group of wine tasters that has an organization that exists in Israel. I became friends with him and he bought this and he's like, oh, well, this is really good, but it's not so ready to drink. Can we get anything else? I go, actually, I think the next vintage is more ready to drink. So I sold some of the next vintage and he's like, you're right.

I really like this 2020.

Yeah, I think it's really nice too. And it's still, it's going to get better in the, it's going to get better with just coming together a little bit.

That, that—

but, but it's not that tannic. It has—

no, no, it's got some tannins.

Yeah, no, it does, it does have some tannins. And it's, it's a little lower alcohol than my previous wines. The other Owens are all like 14, and this one is at what? Well, no, the 19 says 13.3, so I guess they're not that— maybe I'm going to go back to some of the older ones. A little bit more. 14.1, 14.5. Actually, they might see a trend. You might see a trend that the alcohols are dropping a little bit. Not because I can manipulate, which I would if I could, but the— but just because I— my taste—

that's what you want—

has gone. I'm getting older myself, and I don't want so much alcohol. We all— this has the, the, the The '20 has— there's a little funk right there, a little bit.

Again, it's—

my funk is— I've changed people's experimental results in Davis by my ability to smell. Seriously, a guy had a whole experiment laid out. He was going to prove this point, blah, blah, blah. He invited me to be one of his panelists. I tasted and I threw off his entire results. You know, he was trying to say that the level of SO2 added at the crusher doesn't influence the taste of the wine. And I was able to pick up the change from 30 parts per million of sulfur dioxide at the crusher to 50. I'm like, oh, this one's a little aldehydic. This one had more— I didn't know what the cause was, but I picked up that it was a little aldehydic. And I did it time and time again. He's like, how did you do that? You know, I'm like, I'm not the greatest palate in the world. And we used to have a— we used to have a saying Let me see if I remember. Oh yeah, we called it the Italian tasting. The Davis tasting was your scorecard and how you rated the wines. The Italian tasting was new rating scale, which bottle got empty first. Yeah, I believe that. And when I was at Chimney Rock, when I was at Chimney Rock and I went to some tastings and brought wines from Chimney Rock, they often were not the top-rated wine. They're middle of the path. Maybe two-thirds, three-quarters, never the top-rated wine. They almost always won the Italian tasting, you know. And I used to take— I used to take a lot of pride in that. When, when I went there, when I went to Torres, my Chardonnay, it tied for the best wine of the tasting, but the Italian tasting, it easily burned the top wine scoring-wise of the day. They were, they were opposite wines, so it was kind of funny that they ended up with the the same score, but you know, that can be— it's scoring is scoring.

What was that? Hmm, what was that? It's like a firebox.

Ah, that's at least— that's Eli's homemade smoker.

Okay. Oh, it's a smoker.

He does remarkable—

I was gonna say, it's either— it's either a smoker or it's a— what you call it— of a musha— a mivusha machine.

He keeps on telling me it's luck. Okay, okay. It's not. He makes wonderful stuff. And what we use is we cut up old barrels. And you throw them in? Yeah. There's flavors in here that you won't see in everybody else's smoker, you know?

Wow.

It's, you know, he also uses the standard little chips. I think there's a package of them over here. This is not for flavoring wine. This is chips for the smoker.

Oh, for the smoker. Right, I got it.

Well, you know what, they may be originally for flavoring wine, but we use them in the smoker. French oak is so cool. French oak is wonderful. I mean, American oak is good too, right?

That's so cool.

Yeah, no, no, it's— and then obviously he can do a lot of stuff. He's, he's redesigning some of the place now to, to create a visitor center. You know, which is one of the things. Again, he's rebranding the whole winery from Hakor Mim, which was— not that he's going to stop making all the stuff for kiddush and this and that. He's going to continue with the conditon, with the sweet wines and all that. But he's also doing a higher level now with my help. He's already started. I didn't come here and change the wine.

What's the brand going to be?

Sure Estate.

Okay, Sure Estate. Yeah, very cool, very cool.

Yeah, no, it's, it's, it's, it's time. He's a little bit behind the times and catching up with what people want. But never mind, some people pick it up later, some people pick it up earlier. I, I find myself now when I go to festivals, a lot of people have never heard of me. Now there are guys more my age that like, we wanted to meet you, you know, we know your wines from Recanati. We even Occasionally there are people who know my wines from Tisby, who know the change that Tisby went through when I was there and the stable care. I mean, I think we had a Merlot from stable care, which, you know, back in those days, how many Merlots went 10, 12 years? And I thought it would from the beginning. I thought it would. The berries were very special in stable care. It's very small, very thick-skinned, really different from berries from anywhere else. Benzimra at its best is like Stag's Leap. Elegant. You get elegance from up there. That's the 2001, the Dalton grapes that we turned into a special reserve.

You actually mentioned something really interesting when you were at Wellington Vineyards.

I work with 100-year-old vines.

Yeah.

Field blend. The vineyard was a field blend. You're a conte boucher. The vineyard was a field blend. Mostly Zinfandel, but also Carignan.

Yeah.

Uh, which was— yeah, Petit Syrah.

All of the Mediterranean ones that are here, like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The only one that wasn't that was— and it— and that's an incredible grape because that's so thick-skinned, it like imparts incredible tannins.

It's, it's, it's, it's not— it's just a thick skins or only the— it's actually the whole flesh is red. Yeah, you squeeze red juice out of it. It's unbelievable. Yeah, we actually made— again, it was a very small part of the vineyard. Yeah, but we made it, we vinified it separately, you know. So we had, if I remember exactly, we had 2 barrels of Alicante Boucher, right? It never ever made it to the open market. Why? Sonoma would have this once a year. We hated the wine. It was terrible wine. It was so tannic and black.

It was like gripping tannins.

Awful, awful wine. Just awful. We didn't like it.

Peter didn't like it. Peter and myself.

We didn't like it. Wait, let me tell you a story about it. We would have this— the Sonoma Valley had, I think, 2 weekends that they would be, you know, we were in the Sonoma Valley, right? In, in off the main road, but just off the main road in Glen Ellen, or on the way to Glen Ellen. I don't know if you know Sonoma Valley, but if you did know it, that would be— and, and Sonoma Valley is an amazing place, you know. What's her name, M.F.K. Fisher, lived in Glen Ellen for— there's, there's food and wine stuff that's very, very deep at the roots of Sonoma Valley. But, uh, we, we, we made these two barrels, and this weekend when people would come up we'd offer them to taste out of the barrel. And the whole way we'd introduce it, we hated, we hated the wine. That's why we kept it out of the— didn't use it in the blend. If a guy came and his belt buckle was bigger than his shoes and he had a kind of a black beard and a big handshake that like crushed your hand we'd make sure to get them on the alibi about Canté Boucher, and we'd introduce it by saying, now, if you want a wine that'll take the enamel off your teeth after 2 glasses— we've sold— yes, we've sold the whole thing as futures. There was paid for before we ever bottled it, right? You know, I—

it's just, you, you Does that ever calm down?

Does it ever become a good wine? Yeah, I've had— back in the day, I've bought Petite Syrahs, uh, talk about Stag's Leap. Stag's Leap Vineyards, not Stag's Leap Wine Cellars, but the jumping stag of the two Napa Valley labels. I bought one of those and waited 20 years. I bought two bottles. I waited 10 or 12 years before I opened the first one. Tannic and terrible. I wait another 10 years or so, about 20 years old, I open that one, still not a good wine. Chances are, if it's not in some kind of balance to start out with, it never will be. Now, I say that, there's limits to that, okay? I'm not a big fan of Ramada Galán Cabernet the day it's released, but come on, you wait 5 years and they're good wines. You wait 10 years, they're terrific wines.

They're actually getting better that way. They're becoming much more approachable than—

They might have changed some equipment. Yeah, I don't like some of their equipment. They have some very clever ideas to limit that, but look, they're on a big scale. When you're on a big scale, it can be an issue here. When you're on a big scale, it's difficult not to over-extract tannins. And without getting into the technical reasons for that—

Got it.

It's— you're on a big scale, it's difficult. And they had some tricks on the way there to prevent that. You know, they have the press that moved. They didn't have to move once the wine was done in the process.

Yeah, and they would move the press to each—

they would move the press to each one. So the grapes came straight down.

Does that as well. Okay, Yatir has a small—

Iran Goldwasser.

Okay, Iran Goldwasser.

That's— he's one of the guys I have the most respect for in all of Israel. Okay, Eran, if you went to the Apteo with me, instead of being with the marketing people, you meet Eran Goldwasser. Because why? Because he wants to hear my opinion of what he's doing. Because I'll be honest and I'll say, oh, this is good, but I think it's got a little bit this and that character to it. You know, maybe, maybe something he doesn't pick up that I'll pick up in the wine. I mean, the people that know me, him, uh, I was impressed with that.

I'd never seen that I don't think I've ever seen that before where they move the press to the fermenters to—

Well, the standard Napa Valley practice was you dump from the press into a dolèv and then just move the dolèv to the press. It's slow and clunky compared to other things. But the point is the better places don't mechanically move the stuff. They don't take a pump and suck it up. Gravity, or, or like I said, well, in the end, if you, if you dump into a dolav, you dump with gravity. You lift it in a forklift and then you dump into the press with gravity, right? You're still not—

this is actually, this is actually a small press that they move to the front of each one. Yeah, that's cool. That blew me away.

The other thing, I, I know in Matagalán's case it's a big press that they move, right? It's like on a railroad track and so same thing, but it's a little bit different.

Harigalil is almost the same. It's a similar type of setup, but it's not the same practicing people as, um, Ramata Golan.

Well, it was always a different winemaker. Okay. No, I mean, they have their own staff for— yeah. What's, what's their top wine? The blend? It's like a—

it's not their top wine, but it's the one that they're— it's the most popular one.

They make a lot of of it. Yeah, yeah, it's— that's a very good wine for the money.

But one of the things I learned was don't talk about a wine unless you have enough of it, because it just— I talked about it and it's gone. There's nothing else. The price went through the roof and everything. So there's a couple of us who now, when we talk about wines, it's, yeah, it's, it's okay, it's nothing special. Whenever I say that, it means—

what the hell am I having a podcast with you for? I want the guy that raves about something and says it's no joke.

I rave about it, but it's, but it's, it's way too—

it's—

yeah, there's some wines that, um, in my life I've— yeah, I, I missed out on because I raved about them and then all of a sudden they weren't available. So it's kind of crazy.

See, but It's like you could have done that for Recanati and the prices didn't go up. You know, when we won those awards, I guess we could have raised prices when we started to win those— some of those awards. The RSR, it won the Best Wine of Israel Award in Vinexpo Bordeaux 3 times out of 4 years that I made it.

Wow.

Okay, so that's like an incredible record. And I'll tell you myself that that's You know, you need to have some luck maybe to do it. Although the last one to win was the 2005 vintage. That wasn't luck at all. I mean, that, that wine, mid-fermentation, I said it's going to win the award. This is just the best wine I've ever made. It still drinks well now. Wow. I had a bottle not so long ago. It's, it's still good.

I remember that one.

That was it. But, but Riconati, our economic model was such that, like, when we made Petit Syrah Zinfandel. Okay, so we're the first person to make a high-quality Petit Syrah. Nobody— us and maybe Assaf at the same time, but I think he was always like a year after me. Well, maybe he was at the same time. Assaf and I have similar ideas maybe in winemaking. But Cabernet Franc, for example, you know, nobody was making Cabernet Franc until Recanati started making really good Cabernet Franc. And then and, and I think Asaf about the same time that we both started making really good— 2004. And, uh, I told you I wanted to tell you a story. He was a Spectator writer, and I was hooked up with him by Recanati's American agent. And I give him like the whole range of, of Recanati wines, and he's like, really likes the Chardonnay. And at the end, I opened up so many wines, I'm gonna maybe visit some of other visits, but you know, any two bottles you want you can have. And he had a special reserve there from like 2005, excellent wine. And he had the option— maybe I told him he couldn't take the special reserve, I don't know. The Cabernet 2005 vintage for Recanati was the Merlot Reserve, the Cabernet Reserve, Cabernet Franc Reserve. These were— every single one of them was like excellent, excellent wines. And he wouldn't taste the Cabernet Franc. He's like, I don't like Cabernet Franc. I'm like, you really should try it. He said, what are you gonna want? I don't like Cabernet Franc. You know, you're wasting the tea opening on me. You're really gonna like this if you try it. Finally, I twist his arm so much, he lets me open and pour it for him. Hmm. He puts it down. A few minutes later, he comes back. Puts it down again. 3 minutes later, he comes back. I finished the tasting. It's the second wine that he wants after the Chardonnay. I don't know if this guy is ever going to Cabernet Franc if he doesn't first push to taste Cabernet Franc that I made, which, I mean, I had been to France and done a trip through the Loire. Again, I'm not stuck on kosher, so I have whatever I want to drink in the Loire Valley. I mean, yeah, there's Cabernet Franc that's green and thin, and there's Cabernet Franc that's incredible. And Loire Valley, I trip through the Loire Valley. I, I work up in the Sierra foothills where Cab Franc outperforms Cab at Chimney Rock where I work. Yep, the Cab Franc was a really tough go. Napa Valley, that's Stag's Leap.

'95 and '96.

Napa Valley Cab Franc was not very good. Just, just whatever. It's not— get up to the Sierra foothills. Cabernet Franc is better than Cab Sauvignon Merlot. That fact made me think, well, in Israel, our best grapes are in the mountains. Maybe Cab Franc is going to be really good in the mountains. Nobody else is into it here. Let's see what it can do. And there's so many crazy things about Israel. So the grape growing is so behind. One of Tishbi's best vineyards was Kvar Yuval. Okay, it's not high, but it's really good soil and it is north, not that that really matters in Israel. We don't have enough north to south distance, but anyway, it was a very good vineyard. You had Cabernet and Merlot. I actually think Kvar Yuval was one of the ones I made as a vineyard designated at Tisby. If I remember correctly, it was Cœur du Val. But the Cabernet and Merlot are, you know, two blocks, and it's really one vineyard. What does he do? He's got the Cabernet on the flats where the soil is heavy and the Merlot on the slope where the drainage is really good. All you have to do is in your life read a little bit about Bordeaux. And why Merlot gets planted in heavy soils and Cabernet gets planted in light soils. And you'll know that you shouldn't plant the Merlot in the weak soil and the Cabernet in the strong soil. You're going to be struggling viticulturally from day one. But people in Israel don't— Israelis don't like to read. They like to just do stuff.

They like to experiment for themselves.

Whatever. I know, but that It would still be an experiment if you had two blocks and you put them in each— each grape type was in the right place for itself, right?

Right.

And the whole vineyard would be easier to manage because like one watering regime might work for both of them. If the Cabernet— if the Merlot was in the heavier soil, all right, you probably have to go. No, if you want to taste this, I'll open this.

No, no.

Or if you want to taste— or if you want to taste the Liquidity, I'll open a Liquidity for you. There's very few of those left.

What year was that from?

What year is what? The Liquidity?

Liquidity.

I have a '14 Liquidity. That's a '14. Which is a very good vintage. And it's— I wrote it up recently. I don't know if you follow my Facebook page at all, but I talked about it recently and it's like perfect now. It's absolutely worth the drinking time.

I would love to taste it, but I would love you to come over to my house and have something to eat and taste it.

All right, let's do that. Okay, I'm happy to take up a An invitation to—

are you kidding? It's my pleasure.

No, I say, again, I hope I don't have too many expectations, but the whole Indian background and, you know, my knowledge of— I, I'm very snobby about food. I made French and Northern Italian, right? This was my focus, and with Asian influences and fusion. And it's not now, we're talking about 1980. Yeah, right. Yeah. So it really was the invention of fusion. It did grow out of California, right? Uh, blah blah blah. I really never liked Indian food because even the best places in San Francisco, the best place that I went to, the food was eh. And I started writing a little bit while I was in Davis, and I went to a local co-op supermarket and say, you know, I'm interested in writing stuff, stuff. You, you want somebody to write some stuff for you? Oh, We need cookbook reviews. I said, oh, that's right up my alley. I used to be a chef. I was an English literature major once upon a time, actually comparative literature at Columbia. So they hand me a couple of Indian cookbooks and say, see what you think. I think 3. So I'm like, Indian? You know, I never liked Indian food. So I go into these cookbooks and they were clearly not from professional chefs. They were from home cooks.

Right.

And I'm like, I almost dropped dead at how good the food was. This home food, this lady named Babka Chakcha has these recipes which you follow them to the letter. You didn't make a— and I'm all the time adjusting French and Italian recipes to my taste. Squeeze the lemon juice in Alfredo, and nobody does that. Lemon juice in pesto. This food is unbelievable. Just, I was like blown away by it. And then as I'm here and I learn more and more about the kosher rules, which I never paid attention to before I was here, and I got married to a woman that keeps kosher, you know, it's Israeli lady, not religious, but though, you know, you keep it kosher in the house. That's just, you know, you don't have to be religious to keep kosher, right? Right. No, you're traditional. Traditional. 100%, right? And I'm like, well, Indian food really works with kosher. There's so much— it's vegetables, you know. You know, okay, most of it is so vegetarian-oriented. I, I— by the way, one of the things as a chef, I never went to cooking school. I taught myself. I, uh, but again, I'm a Columbia guy, right? Not a lot of people that go into the food chef business.

I'm out of Columbia. Yeah, I know.

I actually worked in a kitchen. This is— I'm sure you didn't read this about me— that 464 Magnolia kitchen. We had two dropouts 3 guys from Columbia and 1 from Brown. We had a 4-man kitchen and 3 of them were Ivy Leaguers.

Ivy Leaguers, right.

And oh, the 4th guy, I don't know, he was from the South somewhere, but he could easily have been, you know, whatever. He could have been Vanderbilt or one of the best schools in the South. Tulane, Vanderbilt, whatever. He had the—

Did the one who dropped—

He was as intelligent as we were.

Did the one who dropped out of Brown go to the culinary school in, uh—

No, the one that dropped out of Columbia went to the culinary, Hyde Park.

Yeah, okay.

And the other— and the southern guy, right? Two of them were Hyde Park graduates.

Okay.

So they were Hyde Park. Me and the— me and the brown guy were just— I taught the brown guy. I brought him into the restaurant when I didn't like some of the workers. I brought him in and he started as a dishwasher. He probably washed dishes for 2 weeks, and the manager came in and watched him and said, what the— the bottom of stockpots, which had been black forever, were shiny silver. But this, this kid was a crazy athlete. He was a, like, a championship— not championship, but he was an off-road skier. Yeah, cross-country skier. You know, like, he'd go and do flips off the places he didn't know if he was going to land or go fall 1,500 feet. And stuff. So he's a little crazy, but he was also a very, very good athlete. And he introduced me to martial arts, which is also part of my life that I mentioned it, I guess.

Yeah, it's still—

I wish I wouldn't have diabetes. I mean, if I'd kept the martial arts up, there's no way I would have ever gotten diabetes. I never would have eaten so badly and, and treated myself during martial arts. I would practice 3 hours a day. Real martial arts teaches you two things. For me, they're things that I have a problem with. One is to stop having your brain work or think or talk, you know, not hearing too much in your head. I don't know how to explain that, but it's quieting your mind. I think it's a state Orthodox people reach during prayer. I think in meditation and martial arts, and deep prayer bring you the same things. You know, there's something about the way you breathe that changes, and something about your head, the focus of your head becomes, you know, it's not that you, at least in meditation specifically, it's not that you stop paying attention to it, it's the opposite. You just quiet the noise inside your head.

So you become so pure.

So you pay attention to everything more. You, you're more in this world. And that's— look, I'm— it's funny, I'm not Jewish religious, but I'm very religious in a way. I think Hashem— or I wouldn't call it Hashem, but I think there's a way for us to be in this world, in contact with it.

I think you're right to call it Hashem. One of the hardest things in life is to build a kesher a connection to God. Okay? It's just an incredibly difficult thing. The people who have stuff going on in their heads with regard to God, that feel that they can feel God's there, they can feel his influence in what they do, they can feel his influence in how he comes out.

It's the feeling. Yes. It's the feeling. Yes. And to reach that feeling, you have to do things. You have to Change, it's, it's, it's not—

I'm just telling you, it's not so easy, but it's not, it's not something that comes just because you follow a certain set of rules.

No, but I do think prayer, the very act of prayer, helps.

Helps.

Yeah, I think it, I think it helps you reach that prayer, that thing. And for me, we call it Hashem. I don't, I don't know what they call it, but it's the spirit.

It's so—

it's the spirit That's everywhere.

Well, thank you.

You're welcome.

Thank you so much for the tasting, but also the time and the time to interact a little bit. But I would love you to come over and sit with me in the house and taste some wines. There's some interesting wines I would love to bounce off of you from other winemakers.

Just be careful about using my words, because I'll be brutally honest. I mean, I have no problem with that.

This is your host, Simon Jacob of the Kosher Terroir. I have a personal request. No matter where you are or where you live, please take a moment to pray for our soldiers' safety and the safe and rapid return of our hostages. Thank you. I hope you have enjoyed this episode of The Kosher Torah. It was exciting and informational to me as well. Louis Pascoe is an incredible, incredible guest. 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. Again, thank you for listening to The Kosher Terroir.