The Wine on Trial

Welcome to the Kosher Teruah. I'm Simon Jacob, your host for this episode from Jerusalem. Before we get started, no matter where you are, please take a moment to pray for the safe return home of all our soldiers, If you're driving in your car, please focus on the road ahead. If you're relaxing at home, please pour yourself a glass of wonderful kosher wine. Sit back, relax, and enjoy. Before we started recording tonight, I did something to a bottle of wine that would horrify every marketing department on earth. I took away its name. The whole bottle is wrapped, capsule to punt. The label is there somewhere, suffocating in the dark. There's a strip of masking tape where the capsule used to show. And that, that is the wine in my glass right now. Here's what I'm willing to tell you. It's red. It costs less than a good pizza, and I bought it in a shop where nobody speaks in hushed tones, off a shelf at hip height, which is, by the way, where shops put bottles they don't think they need to convince you to buy. Remember that. It comes back at the end. Here's what I'm going to tell you. I'm not going to tell you the name. I'm not going to tell you the grape varietal. Not the country. Not even the vintage. Not for 5 full chapters. Because tonight, you and I are going to do something the wine world usually reserves for its priesthood. We are going to take A wine apart with our eyes, with our nose, with our tongues, and with a notebook, and finally with a scorecard. Every structured tasting method the wine world has ever devised, in ascending order of seriousness. From the 3-step glance you can do at a crowded Shabbat table without anyone noticing, All the way up to a deductive grid so demanding that the exam built on it, in its hardest form, has been passed by fewer people than have flown in space. And here's my promise: by the final chapter, before I say one word from the label, you will know this wine's climate, its grape, Or close enough to argue about it. Its age within a year or 2. Not because I told you. Because you deduced it. Because 5 frameworks, laid one over the other like transparencies, will have drawn this wine's portrait in the air. And when the sack finally comes off, I think some of you are going to laugh out loud, and a few of you I suspect are going to be a little annoyed with me. Good reactions are the entire point of this episode. Welcome back to the kosher terroir. I'm Simon Jacob, and tonight's episode began like the best ones do—with a question somebody actually asked me. A friend at a Shabbat table, watching me hold a glass. Up to the candles. He asked, how do you learn to do that? Is it a gift, or were you just born with your palate? And I gave him the answer that 50 years of drinking wine from the table side, not the cellar side, have taught me. No, nobody is born with a palate. There is no gene for detecting cherries. What every taster has, from the nervous beginner to the master sommelier, is a framework. A fixed order of questions you ask the glass, in sequence, every single time. Look before you smell. Smell before you sip. Structure before flavor. Conclusion last. Always last. The magic trick was never in the tongue; it's in the sequence. And if that sounds suspiciously unmystical, good, because the idea should feel deeply familiar to us. We are a people of seder, of sacred sequence. We have a seder for prayer. We have a seder for Pesach night. A seder for which blessing comes before which, and we have had one for wine for two thousand years. The Gemara in Tractate Brachot lists the requirements for a kos shel beracha, a cup of blessing: how the cup is rinsed, how it's filled, how it's held, where your eyes rest when you hold it. Read that page and tell me it's not a tasting protocol. The oldest structured framework for paying attention to a cup of wine was not written by the Wine Academy in London. It's ours. So, 5 chapters tonight, 5 instruments, each one sharper than the last, all of them aimed at the one bottle sweating Under the covers on my desk. We start with a 3-step glance: look, smell, taste. And the single most useful trick in all of wine, the rule of big to small, which will improve your smelling before this episode is over. Then the famous S's: see, swirl, sniff, Sip and savor. And what swirling actually does physically, chemically to the wine and to you. And then the tasting journal, a British grid used in every serious wine classroom on earth, which turns your scattered impressions into notes your future self can actually use. And then my favorite, The detective chapter. The deductive method, where every observation becomes evidence. This acidity testifies to a climate. This color testifies to an age. The glass becomes a witness under cross-examination, and it cannot lie. And finally, the scorecard, a 20-point system built at the university laboratory in California, where wine is not a romance, it is a defendant, and every fault costs it points. 2 invitations before we begin. First, go get a glass. Any bottle, truly any bottle. These frameworks don't care what they're pointed at. That is exactly what makes them frameworks. Pause me, pour something honest, and do each chapter along with me on your own. By the closing, you will have tasted it 5 different ways, and I promise you, it will not taste like the bottle it was in chapter 1. And second, a quieter invitation for the very end, because there is one more voice waiting to testify about the bottle Undercovers. The halacha itself has already ruled on this wine. It ruled centuries before I ever wrapped the label, and its ruling was not a compliment. Which page of the Gemara, what it said, and why I think that ancient verdict and tonight's tasting need each other— that waits for the end. After the evidence, after the score, when the covers come off. But every trial begins the same way, not with testimony, with a look, the accused standing in good light. First, let me set the stage. It's Friday night, a crowded table, yours or one you've been invited to. Somebody's uncle is halfway through a story that has no ending. There are children under the table conducting business of their own, and somebody has just poured you a glass of red wine that you did not choose from a bottle you cannot see because it is somewhere down at the other end of the candles. You have maybe 30 seconds of privacy with this glass. No notebook, no swirling theatrics. You swirl dramatically at that table, and believe me, the uncle stops his story for you. 30 seconds, a glass, and a white tablecloth. Good news, 30 seconds is enough, because the smallest framework in wine, the one every other framework tonight is built on top of, Takes exactly 3 steps: look, smell, taste. That's the whole thing. It was invented for tables exactly like ours. And tonight, it's our arraignment. The accused stands in good light, and we take our first honest look at it. Step 1: Look. Not at the wine, through it. Hold the glass at an angle over something white— a napkin, a tablecloth. The Shabbat table is the best-equipped tasting room in the world. It comes preloaded with white backgrounds. You're asking 2 questions: how intense is the color, and what exactly is the color? Here's why it matters. Color is one clue a wine cannot hide. It testifies mostly about age. Young red wine sits in the ruby family— bright, vivid, a little blue in its purple. Old red wine drifts towards garnet and brick, fading first at the edges. Like a photograph left in the sun. So look at the rim where the wine thins against the glass. That's where the wine keeps its birth certificate. So our defendant, over a white napkin, is between ruby and garnet, bright, clean as stained glass. And vivid all the way out to the rims. No fading, no color of brick, or what they call bricking, at the edges. Whatever this wine is, it's not very old. Write that down. That's testimony, and it's already on the record. If you're tasting along at home, pause me, tilt your glass, Over something white. Is the wine ruby or garnet? Does it have a vivid rim, or is it fading, or turning brown, or bricking, as we call it? Say it out loud. That's your first line of evidence. Smell. And this is where I hand you the single most useful trick In all of wine. Put your nose right into the glass, all the way in. Don't be polite about it. And take a gentle whiff. Now name the first 2 things you smell out loud before they evaporate on you. First impressions and smelling are like dreams, vivid for about 4 seconds and then gone. But here's the trick, because I know exactly what just happened to half of you. You smelled it and your mind went blank. It smells like wine. Everyone starts there. The mistake is trying to leap straight to the bottom of the ladder, hunting for wild mountain blackberries, like the critics do. Nobody's nose works that way. Smell works from big to small. So ask the big question first. Is it fruit at all? Yes or no? If yes, is it red fruit or black fruit? Red is cherries, raspberries, pomegranates. Black is blackberries, plums, cassis. Only then, once you've picked a shelf, do you reach for a specific jar. In our glass, is it fruit? Yes, loudly, loudly yes. Red or black? I'd say red, bright red. Berries, the small, sharp kind. The kind that stain your fingers. And behind the fruit, way at the back, there is something that isn't fruit at all. Something savory. I'm not going to chase it yet. It's a whisper, and Chapter 2 has the tools for turning whispers up. But I heard it, and so does the record. Okay, fruit, red, berries, a savory something behind. 4 words, and that's already a better tasting note than most of us have produced in our lives, because it's built on a ladder, a ladder we can climb again tomorrow on any wine anywhere. Step 3, taste. Take a small sip, smaller than you'd want to, and before you swallow it, let it actually travel. Most of us drink wine the way we drink water, straight down the middle. Nothing touches the sides. Tonight, let it reach everywhere. Because your mouth is not one instrument, it's 3. And they sit in different places. Sweetness announces itself first, right at the tip of your tongue. Acidity, you feel at the sides. It's whatever makes your mouth water after you swallow. And tannins, and tannins, the grape skin dryness you feel on your gums, that faint suede glove Dragging across your teeth, kind of like what you get with strong tea. Our defendant, then. Sweetness? None. Absolutely bone dry. The tip of my tongue got nothing. Acidity? Oh yes, my mouth is watering right now as I talk to you. This is a fresh wine, a bright one, a wine With its posture straight up. And tannins present but polite. A soft, dusty grip on the gums. Suede, not sandpaper. It doesn't sit heavy either. This is not syrup. Somewhere in the middle for body, and nimble with it. 30 seconds of attention. 3 steps, and look what we already have on record. Not old. The rim swore to that. Bright red berry fruit with a savory shadow. Bone dry. Fresh enough to make your mouth water. Gently gripping. Medium built. At half the dinner tables on earth, that sentence Makes you the most informed person sitting there, and nobody saw you do anything except glance at your glass and enjoy it. And notice what we have not done. We have not named a country. We haven't named a grape. If somewhere in the back of your mind a candidate is already forming, good. Hold it loosely. The evidence gets a vote before you do. But I'll tell you a secret about these 30 seconds. We cheated our defendant out of half its testimony. The glass never moved. We just sat there, still, answering only what it was asked. And a wine, like a witness, tells you far more once you've shaken it up a little. Chapter 2. Good news first: you can now swirl. The uncle is gone. The children have been paid off. It's just you and me, the defendant, and in this chapter we stop being polite with it. Because everything we did in chapter 1, we did to a wine standing still. And a still wine is a witness answering only the questions it's asked: yes, no, red, dry. This chapter is about motion. It's built on the most famous memory trick in wine, the one you've heard at every guided tasting you've ever attended. The S's: see, swirl, sniff, sip. Savor. 5 of them in the classic version, 6 if you add the one nobody admits to practicing in private, and we will, 7 if you count the quiet step at the beginning that most people skip and shouldn't. And I want to teach you the S's the way almost nobody does. Not as choreography, but as machinery. Every one of these rituals does something— physical, chemical. Once you know what each one does, you'll never again feel silly doing them, because you're not performing, you're operating equipment. Starting with the skipped step, the quiet one— preparation. 2 things before the glass is ever raised. Temperature. And the glass itself. Temperature first, because around here, it's personal. Room temperature for red wine is a rule written in a cold northern room about 200 years ago. It did not anticipate a Jerusalem apartment in August. Serve a red wine at our summer room temperatures, and the alcohol shouts over the fruit, Like a bad wedding band. Too cold and the aromas sulk. They simply refuse to climb out of the glass. The working answer: cool your red slightly, 20 minutes in the fridge before a meal. That's it. It's the single cheapest upgrade in all of wine. And the glass? A bowl that narrows at the top. Not because it's elegant. Because it's a funnel. The wide bottom gives the wine room to move. The narrow rim gathers everything that rises off it and delivers it exactly to one address: your nose. That proper glass is a chimney over a fireplace. Tonight, our defendant gets a fair chimney. Okay, now. See. But quickly, because chapter 1 did the looking. But there's one thing we haven't done yet, and it needs a first swirl to happen. Give the glass a turn and hold it up. Watch the walls. Those slow, clear droplets sliding back down are called legs. Or tears. And here I have to break something to you gently. Because somebody at some table has told every one of us with great confidence, look at those legs, that's a quality wine. No, it isn't. Legs are not quality. Legs are mostly alcohol and some physics. Alcohol evaporates off the wet film faster than water. The film surface tension shifts. And the liquid gets pulled up and weeps back down. The physicists even have a name for it: the Mangoni effect, which I mention mainly so that you can retire somebody's leg speech forever at a kiddush. But legs do whisper one true thing, roughly how much alcohol is in the glass. Heavy, syrup-slow tears. You You're in blockbuster territory, 15% and up. Thin and quick, something light. Ours, unhurried, nothing like syrup. Kinda middle of the road. I'd say we're in the mid-13s. Write it down. Our defendant is no bruiser from a scorching valley floor. Moderation entered into evidence. Which brings us to the S the whole chapter is named for. Swirl. Here is what it actually does, and once you hear it, you'll never skip it again. A wine sitting still in a glass exposes a circle of surface about the size of a coin. That coin is the only place where the wine meets air, the only open window that the aromas can leave through. Now swirl And the wine climbs up the walls and paints them. And suddenly the surface isn't a coin, it's the whole inside of the glass. You've thrown open every window in the house at once, and the oxygen you've folded in starts loosening aroma compounds that were sitting there tight-lipped. Swirling is not showing off. Swirling is turning up the volume. So let's ask our witness again, properly this time. And sniff like this: short, gentle whiffs. 2 or 3. Not one long heroic drag. Your nose is a sprinter, not a marathoner. A few seconds into the deep inhale, it simply stops reporting. What you're going for is little sips of air. Okay, that's a lot louder. The berries from chapter 1 are still in front, but they've gone from the berries to wild berries— darker-edged, brambly, less polite. And that savory whisper in the back— remember the one I refused to chase? It's just stepped forward. I can name it now. Balsamic. That sweet-sour dark glaze shadow at the edge of the fruit. The whisper became testimony. It just needed the windows opened. One more layer of listening while the glass is still awake. When you smell a wine, you're hearing up to 3 voices at once. The fruit— that's the grape itself speaking. Vanilla, toast, butter— that's the barrel speaking, if the wine ever slept in one. Leather, earth, dried leaves— that's time speaking, years in the bottle. Our defendant, the grape, is doing nearly all the talking. If the barrel is in there at all, it's a murmur, the faintest vanilla, maybe, at the very back, And I'm honestly not ready to swear to it. And time, time is talking very, very slightly. This wine isn't very young, but it's also not old. The rim told us in chapter one; the nose just confirmed it under oath. And now the sixth S sip—the one. For behind closed doors, the slurp. Take a sip, hold it on your tongue, purse your lips, and draw a thin stream of air through the wine. Yes, that noise. Practice alone, and I mean that. Here's why it's worth the indignity. Most of what you call taste doesn't happen on your tongue at all. That tongue does 5 blunt things. Everything else— cherry, berry, spice— happens when warmed aromas rise from the back of your mouth up into your nose from behind. The slurp is you aerating the wine a second time. Inside your own mouth and fanning those aromas up the back stairs. And there it is. On the nose, it was wild berries. Through the back stairs, it sharpens into red cherry. Fresh, bright, almost snappy. The acidity we met in chapter 1 is carrying the fruit forward. Like a tray. And then the last S— spit or savor? If you're ever tasting through a dozen bottles, a wine fair, a less serious flight, spitting isn't an insult to the wine. It's how professionals keep a working palate past glass number 3. But one glass at your own table on a Shabbat afternoon, Savor. Spitting on a Shabbat afternoon is a sin against the afternoon. Savoring is its own instrument anyway. Swallow. Go still. Count what lingers. Our defendant lingers politely, cleanly, with a few strong elements of cherry. And that mouthwatering freshness. And then it bows out without a single stumble. Look at the file we're building. Not old, twice confirmed. Wild red berries with a balsamic shadow. If there was a barrel, it's a murmur at most. Alcohol levels in mid-13s. Moderation, Fresh red cherry through the finish, which is clean and better than decent. That is a real portrait, and we haven't named a single grape or drawn a single border. But be honest with me, of everything we've found in 2 chapters— the rim, the berries, the balsamic, the legs— how much will you still have tomorrow morning? Because I know what I'll have. It was nice. Impressions evaporate faster than aromas. Every serious taster in history has hit this exact wall, and every one of them climbed it the same way: with a notebook. Or how to write down a wine so that your future self can drink it again. I want to show you the most useless document I own. It's a notebook. I bought it a year ago with real intentions to write down the whines of my life, and I have it open in front of me right now. Here's an actual entry. I'm not exaggerating. I'm reading. The one with the label. Incredible! 3 exclamation points. No name, no year, no description. Somewhere out there, there's a wine I apparently loved more than any other, and all I kept from it was my own enthusiasm. Impressions evaporate. We proved that at the end of the last chapter. But here are the harder truths this notebook taught me. Writing things down doesn't save them either. Not by itself. Because the enemy was never forgetting. The enemy is inconsistency. Incredible, compared to what? Smooth, meaning what? A note you can't compare to your other notes isn't a record. It's a mood with a date on it. Which brings us to the 3rd framework of the evening, and it's time to start naming names. In the introduction, I promised you a British grid used in every serious wine classroom on earth. Here it is, the Systematic Approach to Tasting, the SAT, built by the Wine and Spirit Education Trust. In London, the WSET. If you have ever met anyone with wine letters after their names, odds are these are the letters. And you have to understand the problem the SAT was built to solve, because it's not a romantic one. WSET teaches enormous numbers of students all over the world in dozens of languages And it has to grade their tasting notes. Grade them, which means a note written in Tokyo has to be comparable to a note written in Tel Aviv. You cannot grade incredible. So they did something radical. They banned poetry. The SAT is a fixed ladder of questions. Appearance, nose, palate, conclusions, always in that order, answered from a fixed menu of words. Almost everything lands on one little scale: medium minus, medium, medium plus, going up to pronounced. That's it. It sounds like it would flatten wine into a spreadsheet. It does exactly the opposite, because when 2 tasters on 2 continents both write acidity medium-plus, they mean the same thing. And suddenly notes can talk to each other across a room, across years, across a life. The ban on poetry is the gift. So let's do it right now, on air. Our defendant's formal disposition. Everything the first 2 chapters found, taken down properly, in the grid's own words. Notebook open. If you're tasting along, this is the chapter to actually write with me. 6 slots, 1 line. Okay, here goes. Appearance clear. Brilliantly clear. Intensity of color: medium. Rim: vivid, youthful. Done. 2 seconds, and notice no adjectives were harmed. Condition: clean. No mustiness, no vinegar sting, nothing broken. Intensity: medium. Characteristics: Here, the grid lets our findings in, but makes them stand in a row. Red berries, red cherry, a balsamic note. Primary aromas, nearly all of it, the grapes speaking, as we said. Development, not old. Palate. Now, the 6 dials, one at a time. Sweetness, Dry. Acidity, medium plus. That mouthwatering brightness that has been with us since the first sip. And it's the loudest structural voice in the glass. Tannins, medium. Present, fine-grained. That suede grip. Alcohol, medium. The legs already testified to that. Body medium, flavor intensity medium, finish medium plus. It lingered politely, remember? And now lingered politely has a proper name. Now listen to the whole deposition read back. Clear, medium ruby, youthful rim, clean nose, medium intensity, red berry, Red cherry, balsamic. Not old. Dry acidity medium plus. Tannin medium. Fine-grained. Alcohol medium. Body medium. Flavor intensity medium. Finish medium plus. 30-yard words. That's the entire wine. Portable. Next year. On the far side of 100 other bottles, I could read that back and this glass would stand up again. That's what my Purim entry never learned to do. But the SAT's last rung is the one that separates it from a shopping list: conclusions. The grid makes you commit to a quality judgment, and it gives you 4 honest tests to do it with. Balance. Do the parts agree with each other, or is something shouting? Length. Does the finish hold? Intensity. Does the wine speak up? Complexity. How many voices are there in the room? Balance, length, intensity, complexity. 4 questions. Then you must choose a word. From a short, unsentimental list that runs from faulty through acceptable and good up to very good and outstanding. So regarding our defendant, balance— yes, genuinely. Acid, fruit, tannin, alcohol— nobody is shouting, nobody is missing. Length. Medium-plus. Better than its price class has any right to promise. Intensity: medium. It speaks clearly at a conversational volume. Complexity: modest. One voice, the grape, doing nearly all the talking. The barrel, a murmur. Time, almost silent. Verdict: good. Not very good. Not outstanding. Good. Balanced. Clean. Honest. Ready. A drink-now wine. Not a keeper. And I want you to notice something about this moment, because the whole episode leans on it. The grid just told the truth. It had smaller words available and bigger ones. And it shows the middle, because the middle is what's in the glass. A framework that only ever says outstanding isn't a framework, it's a greeting card. The SAT earns our trust in the next 2 chapters precisely because in this one, it declined to flatter our defendant. And I promised in the introduction that this impulse, a fixed protocol for paying attention to a cup of wine, did not start in London. The Gemara in Tractate Barakhot lays out the requirement for a kos shel bracha, a cup of blessing. Listen to what it asks, and count the steps. The cup is is rinsed inside and out, filled generously full, received in both hands, then held in the right, raised a hand's breadth above the table. And your eyes stay on the cup the whole time. Eyes on the cup. That is a systematic approach: sight, touch, elevation, attention. Prescribed, ordered, repeatable, 2,000 years before anyone in London thought to grade a tasting note. And then the Gemara adds the step no wine school ever wrote. When you've finished, the cup is sent on around the table to your household so that the blessing lands on someone else's lips too. Structured attention that ends in sharing. Hazal understood something the wine world is still catching up to: attention is not complete until it's handed to somebody. That's what a tasting journal really is, by the way. Not a diary. A mesorah. A tradition of your own palate. Attention written down and handed forward Even if the person you're handing it to is just you. A year from now, standing baffled in a wine shop, my poor mentry handed me nothing. The 30 words we wrote tonight, those are an inheritance. So here's the file as it stands one more time. Young, medium ruby, red-berried, balsamic-edged, dry, bright, fine-grained, medium-built, finishing longish, clean, quality good. Every phrase calibrated, every phrase comparable, which means every phrase is now something else too. An affidavit. Because a deposition this clean is wasted on a draw. Evidence like this wants a courtroom, a method that takes each sworn line and asks the only question we haven't dared yet. Not what is in the glass, but where is it from, and what is it, and when? Chapter 4, The Detective. Somewhere in a quiet room, a candidate is standing in front of 6 glasses of wine. No labels, no hints. A clock is running. In something like 25 minutes, they have to tell a panel of examiners out loud, glass by glass, the grape, the country, the region, and the vintage of all 6. Not something Mediterranean. The region. The year. This is the tasting portion of the Master Sommelier exam given by the Court of Master Sommeliers. And now you know where the number from the beginning of tonight's episode lives. 299 people since 1969. More human beings have left the planet than have walked out of that room with a diploma. And here's what everybody else gets wrong about that room. They imagine a supernatural palate, someone who sips and just knows, a party trick scaled up. It's the opposite. The Quartz Method, the deductive tasting grid, The 4th framework of our evening is built on a humbling premise. Nobody can taste a country. Nobody sips and recognizes a region like a face. What a trained taster does is something much closer to home for us. They reason: sight, nose, palate. Then an initial conclusion. Then a final one: every observation becomes evidence, every piece of evidence implies something, and the implications, stacked patiently enough, corner the truth. I've sat with a lot of pages of Gemara in my life, and I'm telling you what the deductive grid is. It's a sugya. Is it shakla, vitarya, and stemor? Proposition, objection, refinement, conclusion. In the yeshiva, we even have a word for the muscles it uses: being midyak, squeezing a line of text for what it must imply, not just for what it says. Tonight, we squeeze the glass. Actually, it's older than the Gemara. The Mishnah, The Tractate Sanhedrin lays out how a Jewish court examines witnesses. The hakirat, the mandated interrogations every witness must survive. And do you know what the court's required questions are? When and where? Which week? Which date? Which hour? What place? Pin the testimony to a time and a location Because testimony that can't say when and where is not testimony at all. Tonight, the glass is our witness. It has been deposed. Chapter 3: Every Line Sworn. Now comes the hakira. When are you from, wine? And where? Open the affidavit. First line: acidity. Medium plus. What does bright acid testify to? Chemistry, not poetry. Grapes hold their acid in cool conditions and burn it off in heat. A wine this mouth-watering was not raised in the scorching valley floor. So a cool climate or a warm one With a trick up its sleeve: altitude. Height does what latitude does. A vineyard at 6,800 meters keeps its nights cold and its acid intact. Cross-examine with the next line: alcohol, medium. The legs said mid-13s back in chapter 2. Alcohol is just sugar that used to be sunshine. Moderate alcohol means moderate ripeness, means a grape that was not baked. 2 independent witnesses, same story. Somewhere cool and somewhere high. Next, the color. Ruby with a tinge of garnet. Rim is youthful. Time hasn't said a word on the nose either. Remember, this wine is 2 to 5 years old. That's not an impression anymore. Between the rim and the fruit, it's established. When are you from? Pretty recently. Not, not old. Next, tannins. Medium, fine-grained. That dusty suede. Thick-skinned bruiser grapes, the big Cabernet family, tend to bring more grip than this. Fine powdery tannins at medium strength points towards a medium-weight grape. And notice what our affidavit does not contain. Vanilla never made it in. We heard a murmur in chapter 2 And declined to swear to it. A wine with this little amount of barrel in it was raised to be drunk, not cellared. Stainless steel, old neutral wood, maybe a short nap in a barrel at most. A style decision, an early-drinking, fruit-first, keep-it-honest decision. And the savory thread? That balsamic shadow that's been trailing the fruit since chapter 1? Pure fruit, polished and loud, is the calling card of the New World style. Fruit with a savory edge, acid running the show, moderation everywhere— that's the Old World accent. I say accent, and I chose the word carefully. Plenty of New World winemakers can fake this accent beautifully, but The Witness speaks with it, and the grid lets us say so. Old World in style. So let's bring in the suspects. Cool or high, not old, middleweight, restrained oak, savory accent, red cherry down the middle. And I know exactly who half of you have in the dock already. Go on, say it. A Judean Hills red. A young Galilee something. Altitude? The Judean Hills have it. Those vineyards sit high enough that the nights bite, even in August. Bright acid, Red fruit, a savory herbal edge? I have poured you wines like that on this very show more than once. It's a reasonable hypothesis. I'm not going to argue with it. Hold that thought. Hold it exactly as tightly as the evidence deserves, and not one finger tighter. Chapter 1, remember. The evidence gets a vote before you do. Who else could be in the room? Sangiovese? A great red cherry grape from Tuscany. High acid, check. Medium body, check. Red cherry, emphatically check. It's close. Here's my hesitation: Sangiovese's tannins usually argue with you. It's grippier than this, more insistent. Especially young. Our witness's tannin is fine and dusty and polite. I won't throw Sangiovese out of court, but I'm squinting at it. Grenacha? Grenacha, if you like. Red fruit, warm-hearted, but it usually runs riper and hotter than the mid-13s. Strike one against. And so we come to a quiet candidate in the corner. Tempranillo. Red cherry at the center, check. Savory, almost leathery balsamic edge, check. Medium everything worn comfortably, check. And that exact tannin— fine, dusty, suede-gloved— check. The evidence leans I want to be more precise about what I'm saying. It leans. It has not yet landed. So here is our initial conclusion, exactly as the grid demands one. This is an Old World styled red from a cool zone or an elevated one, 3 to 5 years old, modest oak, built middleweight and fruit-first, most likely Tempranillo. Or a close cousin, with Sangiovese still seated in the courtroom. And yes, that young Israeli red some of you refuse to release. Fine. The grid doesn't mind. The grid has room for every suspect that survives the evidence. And now the grid turns to me and demands the last box. The final conclusion. Country, region, vintage, producer. Commit, it says, out loud. That's the whole point of the room with the 6 glasses. The courage of the last box. Nope, not yet. Not out of cowardice, but out of order. Because deduction, for all its brilliance, Answers only the Mishnah's questions: when and where and what. It has nothing whatsoever to say about the question your Bubbe would ask first: is it any good? A wine could pass its entire cross-examination and be mediocre. The grid can identify; it can't evaluate. For that, there's one instrument left, the coldest one we own, a laboratory scorecard out of 20 points where every fault has its price and sentiment is not admissible. The final box can wait one more chapter. It's waited since 1969. Chapter 5, The Scorecard. No tablecloth in this chapter. No candles. Just a bench, a bright white lab light, a row of numbered glasses, and a printed card with boxes on it. Because the last instrument of the evening doesn't come from a dining culture at all. It comes from a laboratory. The university laboratory in California, I promised you at the beginning. The University of California at Davis, the place where American winemakers go to school. And you have to know why this card exists, because nobody builds something this cold for fun. Mid-20th century California wine is rebuilding itself from the rubble of Prohibition. Vineyards replanted, wineries reopening, and an enormous amount of wine coming out of them was, to put it kindly, broken. The professors at Davis needed a tool. Not a poem. A tool. Something a panel could use to separate sound wine from spoiled wine, quickly, repeatedly, without anyone's feelings getting a vote. So they built a scorecard, 20 points divided across 10 boxes. Every box has a price. Every flaw pays it. The journal we built in Chapter 3 asks, what is this wine like? The grid in Chapter 4 asks, what is this wine? The Davis card asks the coldest question of the night: What is this wine worth? Not in money, in points. Wine as a defendant, with then the sentence to follow. So here's the card, all 10 boxes. Clarity is 1 point. Color is 2. Aroma and bouquet, the big one, 4. Acidity 2. Sugar balance, 1. Body, 1. Flavor, 2. Astringency— that's our tannin— 2. Freedom from faults, 2. And last, general quality, 3 points. The judge's discretion, the only place on the entire card where the wine can earn something For being more than correct. If you're scoring along at home, one rule, and it's the whole game: be stingy. This card doesn't reward love. It rewards the absence of error. Every point starts in the wine's pocket, and the wine keeps only what it defends. So let's apply it to our defendant. Starting with box 1, clarity. Brilliantly clear. Has been since the first look over the napkin. Full point, 1. Box 2, color. Correct garnet. Correct intensity for this dry wine. Vivid rim. Both points, 3. Box 4, aroma and bouquet. 4 points on the table, the heaviest box, and here comes the card's first honest bite. Clean? Completely. Pleasant? Genuinely red berries, cherry, and balsamic shade. But the card wants layers, aroma and bouquet. Grape and barrel and thyme, voices in harmony. We've known for 3 chapters this wine sings in mainly one voice, clearly, at conversational volumes. 2 of the 4. Tally: 5. Box 4: Acidity. Bright, balanced, alive. The spine of everything this wine does well. Both points: 7. Box 5, sugar balance. Dry, clean, correct. It gets a full point, 8. Box 6, body. Medium and honest about it. Nothing padded, nothing thin. It gets the point, 9. Box 7, flavor. 2 points available here. The flavor is agreeable, fresh, true to the nose. It says just one thing, but it says it well. 1 of 2 points. 10. Box 8. Astringency. Fine-grained, ripe, polite. Tannins doing exactly what a drink-now red asks of it. Both points. We're up to 12. Box 9, Freedom from Faults. 2 points available. And before I award them, let me tell you what the card is even looking for, because faults is a technical word, not an insult. The lift of vinegar where the fruit should be, wet cardboard of a corked bottle, Barnyard where there should be berries. A bruised apple flatness of oxidation. These are the criminals the Davis card was built to catch, and I've been hunting them for 5 chapters in this glass. Nothing. Not a trace, not a shadow. This wine is clean the way a freshly washed window is clean. You forget it's there. Both points, 14 in total. But I want to sit inside this box for one more minute because there's a prejudice here worth naming. There are people in the wine trade, lovely people, knowledgeable people, that would glance at a bottle from that hip-height shelf in its price class and just assume The processing shows, assuming it's been roughed up on its way to you. Heat in particular has a terrible reputation in wine, and a deserved one historically. Boil a wine and you cook away the very compounds we spent chapter 2 coaxing out with a swirl. But here's what the last few decades actually built. And I've stood next to some of this equipment with the winemakers I've partnered with on my own handful of wines, asking my thousand amateur questions. Modern thermal treatment is not a cauldron. It's a plate exchanger. The wine flashes across a heated surface for seconds. Seconds, not hours. Up and immediately down, cold again, before the aromatics know what happened. The industry uses heat all over the place now, in ways drinkers never see— stabilizing juice, taming rough lots, protecting wines that have to cross the ocean in a container in July. Done crudely, yes, it flattens the wine. And the card would catch it right here, in this box. 2 points gone. Done well. You just watched a wine walk through every test we own and surrender nothing to the box at all. Hold that thought. I mean it this time. Hold it all the way to the end of the episode. The last box, number 10. General quality. 3 points for distinction. For a wine that is not just correct but memorable, layered, a wine with a second act. Our defendant is balanced, honest, and knows exactly what it is. That is worth something real. 1 point of 3. It loses 2 And notice what it lost them for. Not an error. Ambition. Nowhere on this card did our wine lose a single point for a mistake. Total, 15 out of 20. And on the Davis card, the band reads like this: 17 and up, outstanding wine of distinction. 13 to 16, sound. Standard, free of defects. Which means the laboratory, in its cold arithmetic, just said precisely what the London grid said in its careful vocabulary 2 chapters ago. Good, sound, true. 2 systems, built 70 years and 10,000 kilometers apart. One to grade students, One to audit and industry. Different questions, different math, no knowledge of each other, same verdict. And we, of all people, know what to call that. The Torah's oldest rule of evidence: a matter is established by 2 witnesses. Tonight, the defendant has them. So here's where 5 frameworks leave us. We know what this wine is like. The journal holds its portrait in 30 calibrated words. We know within a hair what it is. Not old, cool-raised, or high-raised. Middleweight. Tempranillo or its cousin. Old World in its accent. And now we know what it's worth on the coldest card ever printed. 15 out of 20. Sound and clean. Docked only for dreaming small. But look at the card one more time. 10 boxes, and not one of them for what happens next. There is no box for the table it lands on. No box for who lifts it, or what they say over it, or what it means that they say it. The scorecard stops at the rim of the glass. Tonight we don't. The grid from chapter 4 is still waiting, patient as the page of Gemara. Its last empty box— country, region, Vintage name. The courage of the last box. That's the entrance fee to the final chapter, and there's only one way to pay it. Time to commit. All night I've told you what that room with 6 glasses really examines. Not the palate, the nerve. Anyone can gather evidence forever. The exam begins when you have to sign your name to a conclusion out loud, knowing you might be wrong in front of everyone. So, in front of everyone: country Spain, region Rioja, grape Tempranillo, vintage 2022. Ramón Córdova. Rihoja, 2022. So let's read the label. Ramón Córdova, Rihoja, 2022. 100% Tempranillo. The grid landed clean, and one more number, the one I made you remember from the very first minute. I paid about $20 for this bottle. Hip height. A shop where nobody whispers. Now, I know what just happened out there, because 2 rooms of you are having 2 very different evenings right now. Let me visit both rooms. I owe each of you a debt, and I intend to pay in full. First, everyone who has been holding on to a Judean Hills Red since chapter 4, Open your hand. You can let it go now. And please hear me: you were never wrong to hold it. Altitude, bright acid, savory herbs— everything you reasoned was true reasoning. Go back and listen again someday. You'll find I never denied it. It simply was never this wine. This wine came from The other end of the Mediterranean, from Spain. And some of you, the regulars, know why that word lands heavy on this show. You've heard me tell the story of the co-op in Catalan Hills, where a Jewish community walked in one day and asked for something Spain had not produced in 500 years. 500 years from the expulsion. Until living memory, there was no kosher wine in Spain, because openly in Spain, there were no Jews. What survived those centuries survived hidden. Names folded away, candles lit behind shutters, an identity wrapped in a covering. Waiting. So think about what you actually witnessed tonight. A kosher wine of Spain stood in front of every court the wine world owns, wrapped, unlabeled, its name in the dark, and answered every single question truthfully. And when the covering finally came off, it was still itself, still standing, still kosher, and still Spain. We didn't invent that story tonight, friends. We just poured it. In the second room, the connoisseurs, you've seen the label and something in you said, that wine? The kiddush shelf? Because you know this bottle's other secret. And for everyone else, it's time to turn the bottle around. Back label, small print, one word. Uvushal, cooked, flash-pasteurized. In the introduction, I told you the halacha had already ruled out tonight's bottle centuries ago, and that that ruling was not a compliment. Here is that page. The Gemara in Tractate of Otozara rules that cooked wine steps outside The intimacy laws of wine, precisely because cooking changes it, diminishes it, in the law's own logic. Mevushal wine is wine that has lost standing, and on that ancient foundation, a very modern snobbery built its penthouse. Serious tasters don't take mevushal seriously. Longtime listeners, you know this page. We spent a whole evening on it once. But here is what I did to you tonight, and I confess it freely. In chapter 5, I taught you exactly what flash pasteurization is: the plate exchanger. The seconds, not hours. The aromatics untouched. You listened to that whole explanation calmly, fairly, nodding along, because you didn't know whose biography I was reading to you. It was this bottle's. You just heard it without prejudice, because the prejudice had nothing to grab. So understand what the bottle covering was really for. It was never protecting the wine from us. It was protecting us from ourselves. For 15 minutes, you couldn't see the price, the shelf, the word on the back label. So you had to do the one thing the wine world finds hardest. You had to actually taste the wine. And you did. And it stood 15 out of 20. Every point it lost, it lost to ambition. Not one to error. Good, said London. Sound, said Davis. 2 witnesses. The verdict holds. The trial was never about the wine, friends. The wine was just the witness. The defendant was the way we look at labels. And tonight, For 1 hour, blindfolded. We were acquitted. 5 frameworks tonight. 3 steps at a crowded table. 5 S's and their physics. A journal that banned poetry. A detective's grid older than it knows. A cold card from a California laboratory. Underneath their different vocabularies, they are all the same technology. They are machines for paying attention. Attention that doesn't care what it's pointed at, that gives the same 30 seconds of honesty to a $20 bottle of Rioja as to a first growth. And in our language, sustained attention that doesn't check the price tag first has a name. It's called kavod. The scorecard had no box for what happens next, so we go where the scorecard can't. The Gemara in the Tractate of Berachot, chapter 3 of our evening, laid out how our tradition honors a cup of wine. So the glass, rinsed inside and out, Filled generously to the brim. The Gemara likes a full cup. Received in both hands and settled into the right, raised a hand's breadth off the table, no more. And the eyes, the eyes stay on the cup. 2,000 years ago, we wrote a framework that says, before this wine touches your lips, It deserves the whole of your attention. Nobody asked what the wine cost. Nobody even asked what it scored. Nobody asks Hasvashalom whether it's Mevushal. The cup in your hand is the cup you honor. That was always the whole Torah of this episode. Everything else. That's a good wine. It was a good wine at $20 an hour ago. It's a good wine with its name showing now. The only thing that changed tonight was us. And the Gemara's last requirement for the cup of blessing. Remember it. The cup doesn't stay with the one who blessed it. It's sent on around the table to the household. So consider this episode my cup sent to yours. Here's what you do with it. This Shabbat, take the humblest bottle in your house, the one at the back, the one that never gets asked, and before Kiddush, Give it the full trial: 30 seconds of looking, a real swirl, 6 honest words in a notebook. Ask it when and where. Be stingy with the points. And then find me— you know where I am— and tell me what it was and what it became. And if one quiet evening you If you want the strangest proof of what we did here tonight, play this episode again knowing the name. Every word will still be true. That's the thing about frameworks, in wine and in everything else that matters. They're how you tell the truth in the dark. This has been The Kosher Terroir. The defendant is free to go. Preferably to your table. L'chaim. This is Simon Jacob again, your host of today's episode of The Kosher Terroir. Please subscribe via your podcast provider to be informed of our new episodes as they are released. If you're new to the Kosher Terroir, please check out our many past episodes.