What Makes A Wine Iconic?

Welcome to the Kosher Teruah. I'm Simon Jacob, your host for this episode from Jerusalem. Before we get started, no matter where you are, please take a moment to pray for the safe return home of all our soldiers, If you're driving in your car, please focus on the road ahead. If you're relaxing at home, please pour yourself a glass of wonderful kosher wine, sit back, relax, and enjoy. I want to ask you a question tonight, and I want you to actually answer it before I do. What makes a wine iconic? Not good. Plenty of wines are good. Not memorable, even. A rainy Tuesday can make a wine memorable, iconic. The bottle that gets promoted out of your cellar and into your biography. The bottle you still are describing To someone 30 years from now, with your hands moving. So, is it a score? 90-something points from a famous critic? Is it a price? A price that makes your children raise their eyebrows at you? Is it the label? The name everybody photographs before anybody pours? Here's what a lifetime of tables has taught me: every one of those things is evidence of something, and not one of them is the thing itself. This week I was scrolling the way we all scroll, half looking, half elsewhere, and a post From Joseph Herzog stopped my thumb cold. The post was built around the Facebook post that Joseph Herzog had received from Chef Mike at Mike's Bistro in Manhattan. If you've eaten there, you already know. Chef Mike had opened a bottle of Herzog Chalk Hill Cabernet Sauvignon from 1994 and sent Joseph the kind of message you only send when a wine has truly stunned you. More than 30 years on, this wine is still drinking amazingly. Joseph's own reaction in the post: still alive and kicking. Do the arithmetic with me. That bottle is more than 30 years old. There are listeners of the show that are younger than that wine. But that's not the detail that got me, because that came in the second note from the chef. He's running low. He had just sold his last 3 bottles that very week. Joseph wrote back. And I'm quoting, Chef Mike, I feel your pain. A man who feeds people for a living, down to his final bottles, counting them like the last chapters of a book he can't bear to finish. And Joseph heard it, exactly what I heard. This post drew the lesson in one line, and I'll quote it Rather than pretend I said it better. Buy wine for drinking and buy wine for aging. Put bottles away on purpose for those special moments, years, even decades down the road, because when you finally pull that cork, you taste His words again: Not only the wine, but the time and memories that came with it. The years it waited. The person who put it away. Everything that happened to you between the buying and the opening. And then Joseph reached for the exact line I would have reached for. The watch line. Patek Philippe's famous promise. You never actually own one. You merely look after it for the next generation. Maybe, Joseph wrote, great wine deserves a version of that too. Joseph, it does. And tonight, I want to go one step past the watchmakers. Because there's a difference between the watch and the bottle. And the difference Is why wine is the braver possession. You keep a watch by keeping it. You keep a wine by choosing one day exactly who will be at the table when you open it. A great old bottle does more than preserve wine; it preserves time. Welcome back to the kosher terroir. I'm Simon Jacob, and tonight is a different kind of episode. No bottle in foil this time. No scorecards, no grid, no verdict. Regulars will remember we've spent a whole evening on those, learning every framework the wine world has ever built for judging a glass. And I told you then, honestly, that the frameworks work. For what they measure. Tonight is the third leg of that stool. Tonight is about everything the number can't hold. Because tonight, I'm doing something I've never really done on this show before. I'm opening my own cellar, and my family's, and I'm telling you the stories of the bottles That became iconic to me. Not the ones the magazines canonize. The ones that survived, surprised me, connected generations, and worked their way into my own story. The question in the open deserves better than a definition. It deserves evidence. 6 chapters tonight. And fair warning, there's no clock. I'm not rushing this one. And I'd suggest you don't either. Pour something honest. Find a good chair. Some evenings you don't rush, and this is one of them. Here's where I'm going: a wooden case that went through a flood and smelled like it. And a winemaker who had every reason to beg me not to open what was inside. An old argument between a number and a memory, featuring the most famous palate on earth. A family of wines that routinely outlives the people who buy them, and the Jewish table where wine Has been keeping time for 2,000 years. A back room in a Manhattan restaurant that was kosher for only one night. Just me, a vice president of Royal Wine, and a bottle my father bought before some of you were even born. A sanser that hadn't read the manual. And a wine that in the same year received one of the harshest scores ever handed to a serious Israeli red, and a trophy as the best wine in Israel. Both juries tasted the same bottle. One of them missed something. Deciding which one? Well, that's chapter six. And at the very end, a small bottle. In a bedside drawer, the one that was never opened at all. I'll explain when we get there. But before chapter 1, do something for me. Think of the single greatest bottle in your life. Not the most expensive, the greatest. Hold it in your mind. Picture where you were. Now answer me this: Just to yourself. When you remember that bottle, do you remember the wine first or the people? Keep your answer. We're going to come back to it tonight, more than once. Every story tonight starts somewhere unlikely. Mine starts with water, in the one place water should never, ever be. In a case of wine, I'm holding a piece of paper—an invitation. I kept it. Of course, I kept it. Dated for a Tuesday night in the spring of 2016, May 31st—the Tuesday after Memorial Day—and I want to read to you what it promised because I wrote. These words myself, and I had no idea how true they were about to become. A wine and food pairing dinner, 10+ courses, and wines—I'm quoting now—wines that are no longer attainable for any price, wines that would be available to our friends at personal kiddushes. Or in our homes. An evening, the invitation says, that I am not sure could ever be recreated. The evening was a benefit, a fundraiser for Nachum Segal's Foundation for Jewish Broadcasting and its mission of Achdut Yisrael, Jewish unity. If you know the Foundation's work, you know what that meant in practice back then. A Torah dedication to the Ethiopian community in Sderot. Support for a Jewish community in Houston, Texas, that had been flooded out of its homes. A Hanukkah unity concert in the weeks after the terror attack in Paris. Jews showing up for Jews, wherever they were. $1,000 a plate, and every dollar of it The food, the wine, all of it was sponsor-donated. Every dollar went to that work. The dinner was at Nobu in Teaneck. Chef Josh Masson cooked a 10-course tasting menu, and the wine list for that evening wasn't a wine list at all. It was 3 cellars opened. Bottles from the Herzog family's personal collections, bottles from Jay Buchsbaum's cellar, and bottles from mine. Which brings me to the case. In my cellar, set aside for exactly this kind of night, was a wooden case of 1992 Herzog Chalk Hill Special Edition. And if you were with us at the opening, You already know that family's wine, the same Chalk Hill line Chef Mike is rationing right now, 30 years on. In 2016, my case was 24 years old, and it had a problem. Years earlier, water had found its way into the basement cellar of my parents' home in West Orange. The cellar Where that case slept. The same basement I'll mention now that my father had spent filling with the bottles you'll hear about later tonight. A flood in the one room of the house that exists to keep things safe. The wine survived. The bottles were intact. The levels looked right. But the case? The case remembered. Wet wood doesn't forget. You'd lift the lid and it would breathe at you. Damp, musty, that low cellar-basement note that makes every wine person in the room go very quiet. Because here's the thing about that smell: it's almost exactly the smell We're all trained to fear cork taint. A cork bottle announces itself the very same way: wet cardboard, moldy newspaper, a cellar gone wrong. The chemistry lives in the damp wood and cork, so when the wooden case has actually been wet and actually smells like that, The case itself is telling you a story with a terrible ending. Whether it's telling the truth, you can only find out one way. Alicia Wilbur was there that night, from Herzog, from the winemaking side, and she was worried. She had every right to be, and every reason. Think about what I was proposing to pour— the winery's flagship, a wine from a case that smelled of floodwater— into the glasses of a room that had paid $1,000 a seat for charity. And in the winery's honor, with the Herzog family's own bottles on the same table. If that wine came up corked, Or worse— flat, dead, broken. It wouldn't fail quietly. It would fail in front of everyone. There was every reason in the world to leave it closed. There were other bottles. There were safer bottles. And I asked her to open it anyway. I want you to stand where we stood for a second. The cork comes out. And the cork tells you nothing. Corks love to keep secrets. The first splash into the glass. The lean in. The half-second where your nose knows before the rest of you do. Luscious. Velvety. Rich. Deep. Sweet. Mature fruit. A 24-year-old Cabernet. With its shoulders back. Not a survivor on life support. A wine in full voice, at the height of its power. As if it had been waiting in that miserable wet box for exactly this room on exactly this night. The case had been through a flood, the wine had been through a flood, and the wine simply Didn't mention it. And I'll say this quiet part out loud, gently though, because after that night it was hard to miss. We poured a flood survivor at a dinner raising money for a flooded-out Jewish community in Houston. I'm not going to make more of that than it deserves, but having been there, Glass in hand, it's hard not to feel that that evening had a theme that hadn't been printed on the invitation. Now, what did that bottle actually teach me? Because this is chapter 1, and I'm laying foundations for tonight. First, old wine is not automatically good wine. Please hear that. Age ruins far more bottles than it blesses. And that is exactly why opening a mature bottle is dramatic, why your heart rate changes when the cork squeals. If age guaranteed greatness, there'd be no suspense, and the suspense is part of the magic. Every old cork is an envelope With a verdict inside. Second, the outside of a thing does not testify to the inside. A worrying exterior— a stained label, a shabby capsule, a case that smells like a drowned attic— tells you what happened around the wine. It cannot tell you what happened in it. The only witness to that is the wine itself, and it only testifies once. And third, and this is the one I want you to carry the rest of this evening, what made the bottle unforgettable had nothing to do with anyone's rating. It was the age. The surprise. The room. Alicia's worry and her relief, which I promise you was bigger than mine. Nahum's caws humming under the whole evening. The people leaning in. Somewhere out there, that 1992 almost certainly carried a score once, from somebody. Nobody at the table could tell you what it was, and nobody ever will. One more thing about that night, because time doesn't stand still for people either. That worried winemaker standing next to me at the table? Last year, Herzog promoted her. Alicia Wilbur is now their production winemaker. The bottles age, so do the careers. Everything in this story kept becoming more of itself. So here's the first draft of tonight's answer: an iconic wine is not just a famous wine. It's a wine that carries a story forward and still has something to say when it's opened. But wait, I hear it. Some of you are already arguing with me, and it's a fair argument. Simon, aren't scores how we're supposed to know a wine is great? Isn't that the whole system? It's a fair enough argument. The number people are not fools, and I'm not going to pretend they are. So let's have that argument properly. And I'm going to argue the other side first, properly, with respect, because the case for the number is real. And if I pretend it isn't, you shouldn't trust anything else I say tonight. Here's the case for the number. You're standing in a wine shop, 400 bottles on the wall. You have one dinner. One budget, and no time to make 400 mistakes. And on a little shelf tag, somebody who has tasted more wine than you ever will has left you a message. This one impressed me. That message is a gift. It's the accumulated palate of a professional compressed into. Just digits, handed to you free of charge. Scores rescue beginners from bad bottles. They reward winemakers who do honest work in unfashionable places. They give all of us a common language for a thing that is famously hard to put into words. And I'll go further, closer to home. Scores did the kosher world a genuine favor. For a long time, kosher wine would be waved away with a smirk. You know that smirk. But numbers don't smirk. And when kosher bottles started earning the same numbers as everybody else's bottles, on the same tables, From the same critics. A certain kind of condescension got very hard to maintain. The number walked kosher wine into rooms that the label alone was never getting into, and it hasn't stopped walking. In our own decade, a winery that makes only kosher wine, Covenant in California, saw one of its wines crowned with a perfect score. 100 points for a wine you could pour at any Kiddush on earth. Whatever else you think of a number, by the end of tonight, that one mattered. Regulars know we once spent an entire evening on this, learning every framework the wine trade has ever built for judging a glass. All the way up to the 20-point score from a university laboratory. And what I told you that night, I'll repeat now, because I meant it. The frameworks work. The grid works for what it measures. But for what it measures, that's the whole chapter right there. So what does it measure? A score is one professional, one afternoon, one glass, often one glass out of dozens on the same table, tasted against its neighbors, spat into a bucket, described in 90 seconds. That's not a scandal. That's the job done honestly. But understand what you're holding. When you hold that number, it is a snapshot, a photograph of a river, a photograph that can be sharp, well-framed, completely accurate, and the river has already moved on because the wine changes bottle to bottle, year to year. The wine you open tonight. is not the wine the critics meant. And here's the part almost nobody says out loud: the taster changes, too. A winemaker I know— you'll meet him properly before the night's out— once put it to me this way: drink the same wine 3 nights in a row, and it will not taste the same to you 3 nights in a row. Not necessarily because the bottles differ. Because you do. Your palate is a moving instrument. If that's true of the same person across three nights, what exactly is one stranger's afternoon supposed to tell you about your table, your company, and your night? That same winemaker told me a story I think about constantly. Early in his career. At a winery in the Napa Valley, I'll leave its name out as he did. He inherited a Sauvignon Blanc vineyard that simply couldn't give him the flavors he wanted: high yields, low profile. So he worked the problem like the trained professional he is: pick the fruit overripe on purpose. Then corrected the wine in the cellar step by step. A heavily worked wine. A rescued wine. Legal, skillful, and about as far from the vineyard speaks as winemaking gets. That wine went out into the world and came back with the best score that winery had ever received for the category. From Robert Parker, the most famous palate on earth. And the review said, in effect, finally they're doing something right. Now, was Parker wrong? No. That's what makes the story great. The number was honest. What was in the glass was genuinely delicious, and he said so. But the number Had no idea what it was measuring. It couldn't see the vineyard that failed, the harvest gamble, the cellar rescue. It graded the destination and knew nothing, nothing about the journey. And people, that cuts both ways. If a number can't see the story that saves a wine, it also can't see the story that sanctifies one. It can't see that the bottle was the last one your father bought. It can't see who was at the table, or why that night mattered, or what was said over the second glass. It's not that the number lies. It's that the number is blind. Blind to everything that turns a wine into a memory. A score can tell you whether a wine impressed a critic. It cannot tell you who you were with, what the wine meant, or whether you will remember it in 30 years. Think back to chapter 1 for a second. That 1992 Chalk Hill in its miserable wet case. Somewhere, once, that wine almost certainly carried a score. Some magazine, some newspaper, some tag on a shelf in 1995. I stood in that room. I poured that wine. I watched the faces. And I'm telling you, nobody at that table could tell you the number. Nobody ever will. The number evaporated. The night didn't. So here's your homework, and it's the same question from the top of the night, wearing different clothes. Call up the one bottle you remember most clearly, your clearest wine memory, the one you can still almost taste. Now, do you remember its score? Do you even know if it had one? And before we move on, I'm going to plant something. Later tonight, I'm going to tell you about a wine, an Israeli wine, that in one and the same year received one of the harshest scores, a serious Israeli wine. had ever gotten from a major American magazine. And a trophy from a jury in Bordeaux as the best wine in the entire country. Same wine, same harvest. Both juries tasted honestly. One of them missed something. Hold that thought until chapter 6. But first, an honest question deserves an honest next step. If the number doesn't make a wine iconic, what does age actually do? Why does a bottle spend 30 years becoming magnificent while its neighbor on the same shelf just becomes old? One answer involves chemistry, gravel, A noble fungus with terrible table manners, and a family of wines that has been outliving the people who bought them for 300 years. Let's start with the fungus, because it's the best story in wine that nobody tells at dinner. There is a mold, a gray, fuzzy, genuinely ugly mold that attacks grapes In damp autumns. Most years, in most places, it's a disaster. It splits the skins, it rots the crop, growers lose sleep over it. But in a few blessed corners of the world, a certain stretch of river in Bordeaux above all, the mornings are misty and the afternoons are dry. And that's exactly the rhythm that turns the monster into a miracle. The mold pierces the grape's skin gently, like a thousand tiny pinpricks, and the afternoon sun pulls the water out through the holes. The grape shrivels. It turns brown and then purple-gray. Then something close Into a moldy raisin. It becomes honestly the ugliest fruit you will ever see deliberately carried into a winery. And inside that ruined-looking berry, everything that matters has been concentrated: the sugar, the acid, the perfume. Pickers walk the same row again and again, sometimes 5 or 6 passes across the season, taking only the berries the mold has finished with. They call it noble rot, botrytis, and the wine it makes is liquid gold, honeyed, luminous, and very nearly immortal. Years ago, One of the great chroniclers of our corner of the wine world, the writer behind Yossi's Corkboard, Yossi Horowitz, wrote a piece about exactly these wines, and I'm going to lean in on it for a few minutes because he told it right. He opens with the legend of the category. The famous Sauternes estate Whose 1811 vintage set the world auction record for a white wine whose bottles from 1893 were, in his words, supposedly drinking well more than a century later. That legend isn't kosher, so it isn't ours to pour. And one breath of it is all it gets tonight. It matters for only one reason. It proves that wine can be built to outlive everyone who touches it. Reputation through longevity is older than every scoring system on earth. But here's what the corkboard piece was actually about, and this part is ours. The same noble rot, that same misty riverbank, that same near-immortal gold, but kosher bottles. He wrote about Château Giraud, the first growth of Sauternes classified in 1855, whose kosher cuvée from 2001 he called And I quote, one of the best kosher dessert wines out there, period. He also wrote about Château Pied-à-Sauternes from 2006, his own go-to dessert wines for years. He even reached beyond Bordeaux to the Loire, to a Bonnezo from Château de La Felle, 1997. that he described the way you describe a person you're a little in love with. And before you ask, this is not ancient history. As I record this, a kosher cuvée of Giraud, the 2017, is sitting on retail shelves right now. The category is alive. And you can put that wine in your cellar this month, And your grandchildren could plausibly open it at their own simchas. Let me say that again, because it's the whole chapter in one sentence: for the price of a nice dinner, you can buy a kosher wine tonight that is fully expected to outlive you. How is that even possible? What lets one wine cross decades? While another, a wine that costs more, scored higher, came in a heavier bottle, falls apart in 5 years. 6 things, and I'll give them to you the way I'd give them to you at a kiddush, not in a lab. First is balance— nothing shouting over anything else. Second is acidity. The spine. A wine with no acid has no posture, and posture is what holds it up for 40 years. Tannins or sweetness? The preservatives nature built in. Red wines lean on tannins, and a Sauternes wears its sugar like armor. Fourth, concentration. There has to be enough material in the glass to evolve. You can't age an idea. 5, careful winemaking. Clean fruit, honest cellar work. Faults don't mellow, they fester. And finally, 6, proper storage. Cool, dark, still. A great wine badly stored is a library wine in the rain. And one image to carry all 6. The way I've come to think about it, a wine doesn't really improve with age. It's not becoming something else. Aging is a wine slowly telling you the rest of what it had to say. The fruit quiets down, and underneath it, if the wine has anything else to say at all, you start to hear the second voice. The honey underneath the apricot. The earth under the cherry. The 1992 Chalk Hill in Chapter 1 didn't survive despite 24 years. It needed them. To finish its sentence. Now, why am I telling you all this— the fungus, the acid, the armor— in this episode, the one about what makes a wine iconic? Because of a fact about Jewish life so obvious we forget to be amazed by it: wine is our clock. Think about it. When Shabbat comes in, we don't mark it with a food, Or a song alone, or a bell. The Gemara in Tractate Pesachim teaches, "Remember the day of Shabbat over wine." Zochreihu al hayayin. Of everything on the table, wine is what sanctifies time. And it doesn't stop there. Walk through a Jewish life and count the cups—a cup at the Brit. Days old, and there's already wine there in the room. Four cups at the seder every single year. A calendar in miniature. A cup under the chuppah, and the sheva brachot after it. And havdalah, closing every Shabbat exactly the way Kiddush opens it. A cup at each end, like bookends. On the holiest day of the week. In Psalms, it says wine gladdens the heart of man. But in our tradition, it does something more specific than that. It marks. No other food, no other drink is asked to stand at this many of life's doorways. So when a people whose wine already marks time, gets hold of a bottle that holds time, a wine built across decades, something doubles. A bottle laid down by one generation and opened by another isn't just a beverage anymore. It's a vessel of memory. Drinking a mature wine at a Jewish table can feel— and I mean this precisely— Like sharing a glass with somebody who isn't in the room. The person who bought it, the person who kept it, the world it came from. The wine crossed the years so that they could be at the table here tonight. I know this precisely because of my father's cellar. My father laid down wines with intent in the basement of the family home in West Orange. Yes, the same basement, the same cellar that Chapter 1's flood came through. That room holds most of this episode, if you're keeping track. And among the bottles he kept there were cases of Carmel Cabernet Sauvignon from 1976 and 1978— Israeli wine before almost anyone believed Israeli wine deserved any recognition at all. Those wines were made by a man named Israel Flam, the first trained, credentialed winemaker in the State of Israel, trained in UC Davis, decades before Israeli wineries collected such men. If tonight's episode has a grandfather generation, Israel Flam is standing in it. When part of my father's collection eventually made its way to me, I gave it the most protected room my own house had to offer: the bomb shelter. And yes, I mean that literally, a bomb shelter racked out for wine. If you intend your bottles to outlive you, store them like you mean it. A few years back, in 2016, Down in that shelter-turned-cellar, Jay Booksbaum and I found one of those cases, the 1976, 40 years old. And here's what I want you to notice about what happened next. Chapter 1 of this episode was a gala. 10 courses, a room full of people, $1,000 a plate. This was the opposite of that. This was 2 men sitting down in my cellar among the racks. No menu, no audience. Nobody to impress, and nobody to disappoint. Just the 2 of us and a corkscrew and a case with 1976 stamped on the cardboard. The same held breath as chapter 1, at 1% of the occasion. We opened it, and it was delicious—surprisingly, movingly delicious. A 40-year-old Israeli Cabernet from a country the wine world hadn't taken seriously yet when it was bottled, sitting in a basement in the dark, patiently finishing its sentence, waiting for someone to listen. My father bought that case. When Israeli wine was an act of faith. He never knew that one evening, 40 years on, his son would sit in a cellar with a friend and hear exactly what that faith had been saving up to say. That's the generational table. Sometimes it seats 100 people at a benefit. Sometimes it It seats 2, on folding chairs, under a house. The wine doesn't care about the size of the room. It only cares that somebody kept it, and that somebody came back. And I'll note the season, because the timing was no accident. The corkboard piece I leaned on tonight was written as a Rosh Hashanah piece. Sweet wines for a sweet year, and you are hearing this in Elul. With the Amim Noraim a few weeks off, there is no better month on the calendar to put your first honest-to-goodness aging bottle in a quiet corner. Buy the sweetness now; open the time later. Now I told you my father laid wines down with intent. The Carmels were part of it, but there was another case in his cellar, a French one, and the story of how that got there, why a man like my father bought that wine in that year, and the story of the single New York evening, decades later, when it was finally poured and for whom. I need to tell you about my father. My parents came of age in Britain, in a Europe that doesn't quite exist anymore. And here's something that surprises people today, so I'll say it plainly as history. Because it is history. In that world decades ago, plenty of Jews— observant Jews, shul-going, Shabbat-keeping Jews— drank non-kosher wine. Not out of rebellion. Out of reality. Fine kosher wine, as you and I understand those words tonight, essentially did not exist. The category hadn't yet been invented. That was simply the world as they found it. And my father— my father genuinely loved good wine. Not as a trophy. As a pleasure he understood. He had the palate, and he had the patience, which was much, much rarer. So here's the part I want you to hold on to. When quality kosher wine finally began to exist, when it started, bottle by bottle, to become possible, my father didn't buy it as a curiosity. He didn't buy it to support a cause, and he certainly didn't buy it as an investment. He bought it for Shabbat. That was the whole idea. And I find it more beautiful every year I think about it. The best wine he could find, brought home for the holiest table he had. The wine finally deserved the day. He'd been waiting for that. Which brings us to 1986. If you were with us for our $5 for 2 bottles evening— You know what kosher wine meant to most of the world in 1986. And if you weren't, one sentence covers it. It meant sweet, it meant simple, and it meant something you apologized for. That was the reputation, and that was the joke. And into that world came an announcement that must have sounded almost like a misprint. A Rothschild wine, kosher. Baron Edmund de Rothschild's wine company, the branch of the family behind Château Clark in Lissrac, Médoc, together with Royal Wine and the Herzog family, produced a kosher cuvée. The Barons Edmund and Benjamin de Rothschild Haut-Médoc made At Château Clarke itself, the first quality French wine ever exported kosher. And the first time one of the truly great names of Bordeaux— the name, arguably the family, whose very surname means wine to half of the world— put its own name on a kosher label for the world. Think about what that actually was. Not a wine. A statement. A declaration printed on a label that kosher wine was allowed to be great. That the word kosher and the word Bordeaux could live on the same piece of paper without either one flinching. And on the other side of that handshake stood the Herzogs. A family that carries, in its own telling, 8 generations of winemaking memory back to 19th century Czechoslovakia. Old World wine royalty and Old World Jewish winemaking signing the same label. My father saw that label, and my father, the man who had waited his whole life for wine like this to exist on his Shabbat table, bought a case. Actually bought three for Shabbat, not for a vault. I need you to understand that the case was meant to be drunk. That's what makes everything that follows matter. But cases like that have a way of becoming precious faster than becoming empty, and somewhere along the years, that case, what remained of it, passed. From my father's cellar to mine. And I did what we do, what the whole episode keeps circling. I looked after it. I didn't fully own that wine, and I knew it. I was keeping it for a table that would deserve it. 34 years later, after that vintage, February 2020, in the last innocent weeks Before the world shut its doors, the table arrived. Herzog and Royal Wine threw an evening in New York to celebrate the partnership. Thirty years of Rothschild kosher wine, the anniversary of everything that 1986 label had started, and they didn't do it halfway. The venue was the Fulton. Jean Georges. Vongerichten's restaurant down at Pier 17 on the East River, one of the temples of New York's dining. And for one night, one night only, it was made completely kosher. The kitchen turned over and the whole operation transformed so that Jean-Georges himself could cook a kosher menu in his own house. Snapper ceviche, Duck, black sea bass, beef fillet. If you've ever wondered what it takes to make an evening literally unrepeatable, that's what it takes. And the guest of honor had crossed an ocean to be there. Baroness Ariane de Rothschild, the family itself in the room. She spoke that night. About the partnership, about shared values, about what these 30 years had meant. And she raised a glass. And I can quote her exactly because it was reported at the time, and I happened to also be in the room. So she said, here's to the next 30 years. Now, here's the detail that sets up everything. Look at what was poured that night: Rothchild Champagnes, a new kosher cuvée of Château Clark, the anniversary edition of the Haut-Medoc, the 2014, the 2015, and the 2016. Beautiful wines, every one of them, and every one of them new, current releases. The evening was built to celebrate a wine, and the wine it celebrated, the original, the 1986 itself, wasn't on the menu. You can toast a legend all night without ever actually meeting it. Except that in my cellar, there was a case with its name on it. So I brought bottles, bottles of the actual 1986. My father's wine. The founding wine. The wine this entire evening existed to commemorate. More than 3 decades old. And I have to be honest with you about the fear, because the fear is half the story. You know this from chapter 1. A wine that old promises nothing. Pour it proudly at an evening like that, and you are gambling in public. With your father's wine in front of the family whose name is on the label at their own anniversary. If that bottle had faded, if 34 years had hollowed it out, it wouldn't just be a dead wine in a glass. It would be a small tragedy performed live for exactly the audience you'd least want watching. So we didn't pour it proudly. We poured it quietly. Jay Booksbaum, Vice President at Royal Wine, my co-conspirator from the cellar in Chapter 3, a man who has stood next to me at more of these moments than anyone. Jay and I slipped into the back with one bottle, just us, and we had an understanding, unspoken but complete. If this wine is gone, it dies here in the back with two witnesses. Only we would ever know. We didn't even trust it to a corkscrew. We had an asso, the two-pronged puller made for exactly this moment. Two thin blades rocked down along the sides of an old fragile cork, so it. It comes out standing whole instead of crumbling into the wine it spent 34 years protecting. The cork came out beautifully. The pour, the lean-in, alive. Not surviving, not hanging on, propped up by memory and goodwill. Luscious, deep, and layered, and completely, unmistakably alive. A 34-year-old Bordeaux with everything still to say and saying it. Jay looked at me. I looked at Jay. And back in the room of the Fulton, got very quiet for a moment because we both understood what we were now holding. Not a risk anymore, a gift. So we walked out into the room. And the founding wine was poured at its own anniversary, poured for the Baroness and for the teams from both houses, Rothschild's people and royals. The family whose names my father had trusted enough 34 years earlier to bring home for Shabbat, and the family that had carried the partnership since. The wine The evening was built around, appearing in it like a guest everyone had toasted and no one expected to arrive. I'll add a confession here, because it makes the ending better. I hadn't brought only the '86. I'd pulled a few other vintages of Haut-Médoc from my cellar as insurance against exactly the fear I've been describing. We poured them as well, and let the record show, the original, the founding vintage, the oldest bottle on the table, outshone every one of them. I've asked you twice tonight whether you remember the wine first or the people. I want you to notice that in this story, the biggest wine story I have, I can't separate them anymore. The wine is my father buying a case the year the world changed. The wine is Jay in the back room sharing the risk so that I wouldn't hold it alone, and the silly grin on both our faces when we first tasted it. The wine is that room, 3 generations of 2 families, One label between them. Ask me what the 1986 tasted like, and I'll tell you the truth: it tasted like every one of those people at once. A case bought by my father for Shabbat, kept by his son for 34 years, opened in fear in a back room between friends, and poured alive for the heirs of the people who made it. That bottle did not merely survive 3 decades. It brought its own past into the room. So that's the high road to iconic. History, patience, a generation of waiting, and a room that understood what it was drinking. But I don't want to leave you thinking that's the only road. That a wine Needs a Rothschild and 34 years to earn a place in your story. Because sometimes a wine does it in one sip. Sometimes a wine becomes unforgettable in the first 10 seconds by being nothing like what you'd expected. No history required, no patience required, just a cork, a glass, and a sip. And a map quietly redrawing itself in your head. Chapter 4 was the long road to Iconic. 34 years, 2 families, a back room. Now let me show you the shortcut, because sometimes a wine doesn't need decades to get into your biography. Sometimes it kicks the door open in 10 seconds. By tasting like something it had no business tasting like. Everyone who loves wine is carrying a private map quietly, without ever writing it down. You know what things are supposed to taste like. Sancerre tastes like this. Cabernet tastes like that. The map is useful. It's how you order off a list with confidence. And the wines you never forget are the ones that grab a corner of that map and redraw it while you're holding the glass. Let me tell you about mine. Sancerre, the Loire's most famous white. Sauvignon Blanc grown on chalk and marl at the eastern end of the river. And for a lot of drinkers, The very definition of that grape is citrus, cut grass, gunflint, a wine like a cold stream. That's the map. And for kosher drinkers, for years, that map had a hole in it. A real kosher Sancerre was vanishingly rare. When one finally appeared, Properly on the American market. The review that greeted it from Yussi's Corkboard, Yussi Horowitz's much-loved wine newsletter, the same Corkboard who Sauternes piece carried chapter three, called it and I'm quoting, one of the only real kosher sincere wines available. The wine was Roger Miro. Sincère from the village of Chavagnon. And Chavagnon deserves a little shout-out. A tiny storied village folded into some of the steepest, whitest slopes in the region. Soil so famous that connoisseurs argue about the way they argue about vintages. This is not a wine from somewhere in France. This is a wine from a dot on a map, and you can taste the dot. There's even a legend built into this label. The vintage before the one I'm about to describe, the 2007, never officially made it to America at all. It slipped around the edges of the import system, hand to hand, and the people who tasted it still bring it up. The way you'd mention a concert you can't prove you attended. So when the 2012 surfaced, first at the Kosher Food and Wine Experience, the great February carnival of our corner of the wine world, and then miracle of miracles, on actual store shelves, people who knew pounced. The review of it ended, With an instruction I've never forgotten, because it's the least critic-like sentence a critic ever wrote: Buy all the bottles you can find, and then pester your retailer for more. I got bottles, and I opened one, expecting the map— citrus, grass, stone, stream. What came out of that glass instead was lychees. Lychees, an exotic fruit, tropical and perfumed and completely, gloriously wrong. I stood there like a man who'd unlocked the front door and walked into somebody else's nicer apartment. This was a Sauvignon Blanc from Chevignon? From the coldest, chalkiest, most classical address the grape has? Nobody expects the tropics from a French riverbank. And here's what I love most, looking back. I have the receipts. The reviewer's published note from back then, listing blooming flowers, citrus zest, slate minerals, and sitting there in the middle of the list, a hint of tropical fruit and warm spices. With an intriguing salinity that made it, his words, one for the ages. So it wasn't my imagination, and it wasn't one strange bottle. The surprise was there in the wine, on the record, from day one. I just got to be one of the people it happened to. Now, The honest ending. Because this episode tells the truth, even when a neater story is available, I kept bottles, and I went back to them over the years. And with age, that wild tropical voice settled down. The lychees faded, grapefruit and citrus moved in, and it became a lovely, poised, familiar Sancerre. The map restored. Still a very good wine. I enjoyed every bottle, but the version I'll be describing for the rest of my life is the first one. Both versions were beautiful. Only one of them changed me, and that's the lesson of this whole chapter. Sometimes a wine becomes iconic because it teaches you that a grape can be more than you thought it was. So your turn. Same as every chapter, find a bottle in your memory that made you say the magic sentence. Not, this is delicious. The other one. I didn't know wine could taste like that. Whatever bottle just came to mind, that wine is on your iconic list. Whether you knew you had a list or not. Now remember the winemaker from chapter 2, the one with the Napa story and the best score they ever got? I told you you'd meet him properly before the night is out, and you will one chapter from now. But I can't leave the subject of map-redrawing wines without telling you What that man does with white grapes, because the Sancerre surprise was a gift from the vineyard. His surprises are premeditated. His first year working in Israel, decades ago now, he made a Sauvignon Blanc at the Tishbe Winery using techniques he'd absorbed from the New Zealand school. Protect the fruit, chase the aromatics, bottle the sunshine. And the story goes— he told it at this very table— that Daniel Rogoff, for years the most influential wine critic in Israel, of blessed memory, was dining in a Tel Aviv restaurant, drinking Cloudy Bay, the New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc that was then probably the most fashionable white wine On planet Earth. The staff poured him the Israeli bottle next to it, and the great man swore it tasted just like the Cloudy Bay. An Israeli kosher wine from a winery nobody was bragging about, standing shoulder to shoulder with the most famous Sauvignon Blanc in the world. The map redrawn, this time on purpose. Years later, at another Israeli winery, and I'm deliberately not naming it yet. It's Chapter 6's name, and I'm saving it. He bottled his final wine there, the wine's first-ever Reserve Sauvignon Blanc. He tells the story of the press launch, a room full of journalists, Dozens of conversations, bottles opening everywhere. And from 2 or 3 meters away, across the noise, he could smell his own wine every time somebody poured it. Guava filled the room from a glass he couldn't even see. A wine that announced itself from across a party. I've been to a lot of launches. Almost nothing does that. So there are 2 ways a winery draws your map. Sometimes the vineyard does it. A cold chalk slope in Chavagnol decides one vintage to dream about the tropics. And sometimes a winemaker does it. A stubborn craftsman aims a grape somewhere it's never been and hits the target dead center. Either way, the moment is the same. The glass stops behaving, your eyebrows go up, and the corner of your world is permanently bigger than it was one sip ago. But there's a third road, stranger than both, a wine whose strangeness Was nobody's plan. Not the vineyard showing off, not the winemaker's technique, just the grape's own natural voice saying something unfashionable, and a winemaker with the nerve not to silence it. The wine got punished with one of the harshest scores of its year and crowned the best wine in its country. You've been waiting for this since chapter 2. It's time. His name is Louis Pascal. The Napa story in chapter 2, that was Louis. The Sauvignon Blanc that fooled the great Israeli critic into tasting New Zealand, Louis. The guava you could smell from 3 meters across the crowded press launch, Louis. And if that name rings a bell for regulars of this show, it should. A couple of years back, Louis Pascoe sat exactly where I'm sitting now at this table, with a row of his own bottles between us, and told these stories into these microphones himself. Go back and find that episode. It's one of my favorites we've ever made. Tonight, we're getting the one story from that afternoon I've been saving. The best one. Because Louis Pascoe was founding winemaker of Recanati. There's chapter 5's withheld name paid in full. When the Recanati winery came to life at the turn of the millennium, Louis, California-raised, Davis-trained, opinionated, To say it mildly, in the way that only very good winemakers can afford to be, was a man handed the keys to vintage number 1. Now put yourself in his boots for 2001's harvest, a harvest I'll note in passing, tangled up with Shemitah, the Sabbatical year, which deserves and will someday get an episode of its own. You're a brand-new winery. Your own serious vineyards are planted, but baby vines make baby wine. The good blocks you've contracted aren't ready to give you greatness yet. And you're expected by your owners, by the market, and by your own pride to produce a flagship, a special reserve. From what exactly? The answer came from the north. Alex up at Dalton offered some fruit. Serious quantities of it. The better part of 100 tons. And the offer came with a custom that Louis knew well from California, one of those quiet rituals of the wine trade that civilians never see. Here are the vineyard blocks on the table. Walk them. Pick the ones you want. The grower keeps the crown jewels, of course. Nobody hands those over. But in the second tier, there's a gamble available to a man with a good eye. Maybe you can see something in those rows that their own grower can't. And Louis could. Here's what he looked for, and I'll tell you openly That's when he explained this at my table. He laughed, and he said he was giving away something that ought to be proprietary. In Germany, on the Moselle, growers kill for south-facing slopes, chasing every weak ray of northern sun. Israel has the opposite problem. Our sun is a hammer. So Louis went looking for north-facing slopes. High up, around 800 meters, around Keren Ben-Zimrah, high in the Galilee, rows where the vines stand in their own shade for part of the day, ripening slowly, holding their acid, keeping their secrets. The opposite of the European instinct, because we live in the opposite country. He picked his blocks, and he made the 2001 Recanati Special Reserve. Now the wine— Cabernet Sauvignon mostly. Dark fruit, structure, everything a flagship needs. And running straight through the middle of it, unmissable, unapologetic, a streak of green. Let me teach you something about green the way Louis taught it. Cabernet Sauvignon carries green in its genes. It's a family trait. Its cousin Cabernet Franc practically leads with it. And professional tasters, trained ones, have a humbling little secret. Put them in a group, and about the only thing they'll all agree on is that a wine is green. Which green? Bell pepper green? Herb green, leaf, stem, that splinters 10 ways instantly. We all think we can name it. Mostly, we're narrating. But this wine, this wine's green resolved, clear as a bell, into mint. And not just any mint, nana. Fresh nana. The mint of every glass of tea from Morocco to Jerusalem. And I love the question Louis asked himself standing over those tanks, because it's the question of a man discovering rather than designing. What wine smells like Nana? Nothing was done to the wine to make it happen. No tricks, no technique, no Chapter 2, Cellar Rescue. Louis is blunt about it. That's just the grapes. The right rows on the right slope, picked at the right time. A high, cool, north-facing hillside in the Galilee had spoken in its own accent. And here is the part that makes him the hero of this chapter: he had the nerve to leave it in, not to rip it out with a riper picking, Or bury it under oak until the wine tasted like everywhere else. He heard an accent, and he let the wine keep it. So the 2001 Special Reserve went out into the world with its Nanna streak and its cool slope freshness, and the world sent back 2 verdicts. Verdict 1, Wine Spectator. The major American magazine of Chapter 2's teas, tasted it and delivered one of the harshest scores a serious Israeli red wine has ever received— right around 80 points. Their words: thin and acidic. A shrug in print from the most red wine publication in America. Verdict 2: The same wine traveled to Bordeaux, to the major international competition held alongside Vinexpo, the wine world's great trade fair. French palates, Bordeaux winemakers, professors, professionals, and that jury gave it the trophy as the best wine in the State of Israel. While they were at it— this detail is Louis's, and it's delicious— they found the other wines in the lineup heavy and clumsy. Same wine, same vintage. How? And here's where I want to be careful and fair, the way we were with Robert Parker, because the Spectator's tasters were not fools. And Louis himself will tell you so. It's context. Picture the American tasting a flight of Israeli reds tasted together, and in those years, Israeli reds mostly meant ripe, dark, muscular wines. Into the lineup walks a lighter-colored, higher-acid, mint-edged wine From a shaded hillside next to its neighbors, it reads as thin in Bordeaux in front of palates raised on restraint and freshness. The same qualities red as elegance, and the neighbors red as bullies. Neither jury lied. Each jury tasted the lineup it was standing in, which is the deepest. thing I know about scores. It took me until chapter 6 to be able to say it. A score doesn't measure the wine, it measures the room. Louis wanted to take out an ad. I have to tell you this because it's the single best thing anyone has ever proposed doing with a bad review. A quarter page He suggested, laid out clean. Wine Spectator, 80 points. Vinexpo Bordeaux, best wine in Israel. And underneath, 4 words: Try it, you decide. The winery never ran it. I'd have framed it. Here's what 2001 Special Reserve settles for me once and for all. Distinctiveness is not a defect. Not every wine tastes correct. The wines we remember, the ones we make lists like tonight's, very often have an edge, a tension, a strange and particular detail that a generic scorecard reads as an error and your memory files as a fingerprint. Character is not what's left over when you remove the flaws. Character is what a wine says when somebody has the nerve to let it speak. And say the kosher part plainly, because this chapter proves it better than any argument. Kosher wine is not one flavor profile. It is not a category that behaves. Tonight alone, it has been a 30-year-old Cabernet from California in full voice, a Botrytis Sauternes built to outlive us, a Loire white dreaming of the tropics, and an Israeli red with Nana in its soul that beat the whole country in Bordeaux. Kosher wine isn't a lesser shelf. It's a full-size world— classic, strange, age-worthy, regional, occasionally magnificent— and it does not need anyone's permission to have a personality. So, 6 chapters. Count what we've gathered: survival and surprise in a flood-scarred case, the limits of the number, longevity, and the table that passes Wine between generations. History in a bottle that walked into its own anniversary. Discovery in a glass of lychee that had no right to exist. And now, character. The nerve to be particular. But there's one element left. And here's the thing: it isn't missing. It's been hiding in plain sight inside every single story I've told you tonight. Everyone, go back and look. The flooded case had a worried winemaker in the room. The 1986 had a father, a friend, and a baroness. Even Louis's stories are full of people: an Alex with vineyard blocks, a critic at a Tel Aviv table, a room full of journalists. It's time to name it. The closing, the people at the table. So let's name it, the element that was hiding inside every story tonight. Not one of these bottles became iconic alone. Not one. A wine in a sealed bottle in a dark room is only a promise. Somebody has to be there when it's kept, and somebody has to be there when it's opened. Think about who was actually in these stories. The person who poured you your first real glass of wine. Whoever that was for you, you just saw their face. The mentor whose palate rearranged yours. The parent or grandparent who bought a bottle and more importantly saved it. The winemaker standing next to you. Worried sick, telling you what's in the glass. The chef who made the room kosher for one night. The friend who slips into the back with you and shares the risk so you don't have to hold it all alone. The flooded case had Alicia and a room full of people who leaned in. The 1986 had my father and Jay. And a baroness whose family name was on the label. Even Louis's stories, a winemaker's stories, stories about slopes and tanks and picking dates, they're crowded with people the moment you look. A grower named Alex laying vineyard maps on a table. A critic in a Tel Aviv restaurant. A room of journalists smelling guava. Wine does not happen to bottles, friends. Wine happens to people. I've asked you the same question 3 times tonight, and I promised we'd finish it. So last time, bring back the greatest bottle in your life. You've had it in your pocket all evening, and answer: do you remember the wine first, Or the people? Here's my honest answer after 60 years of tasting. I can't split them anymore. I remember them together. The taste arrives with the faces. The faces arrive with the taste. And I've come to believe that that's not a failure of memory. That is the phenomenon. That's what iconic means. A wine becomes iconic at the moment it stops being separable from the people you drank it with. So, the definition assembled. Count it back with me. One hand, 5 fingers, everything tonight deposited. Longevity: a wine that can cross decades and arrive with something to say. Place and character: a dot on a map you can taste. An accent nobody corrected off. Surprise. The glass that redraws your map. Culture and family memory. Wine as our clock. Making Kiddush and Chuppah and everything in between. Carrying one generation to another's table. And the people and the occasion. The elements inside all the others. The room that turns a bottle into a story. Which means the answer to this episode's opening goes somewhat like this: the most iconic wine may not be the wine with the highest score. It may be the bottle that survived, surprised you, connected generations, and became, by part of your own story. There's one more bottle. I've saved it for last, and it's the smallest one of the night. It never went to a gala. It was never poured for a baroness. It was never opened at all. You remember where the episode began? With my parents' Europe, where Jews who kept everything still drank wine of the world. Because our wine, the wine we have tonight, had not been born yet. My mother and father knew those wines, drank them in that world at that time. And my mother's favorite, her favorite wine on earth, was Château d'Yquem, the Golden Sauternes, the wine of emperors, the one from chapter 3. That I said wasn't ours to pour. My father, who understood her, once gave her a small bottle of it, the 1976. And then the world turned. Their children, my generation, kept a kosher table, drank only kosher wine. The Old World's wines stopped coming to our family's table, and my mother let them go. All except one. That small bottle, she never opened it. I think she didn't want to open it at a table her children couldn't join her at. But she never gave it away either. She kept it. Not in a cellar, not on a shelf. In a drawer next to her bed. Her favorite wine, within arm's reach, unopened. A remembrance. And it was there until the day she passed away. 1976. The same vintage as my father's Carmel, the case Jay and I opened in my cellar 40 years on and found alive. 2 bottles from the same harvest, kept by the same family. One was opened at 40 years old between friends and spoke. The other was never opened at all, and it may be the most iconic bottle of the entire episode. No score, no pour, no tasting notes. Just a husband who knew his wife's heart, and a wife who kept the old world in a drawer beside her, close enough to touch, out of respect for the new one her children had built. A great old bottle, does more than preserve wine. It preserves time. So here's my invitation, and I mean it as more than a sign-off. Somewhere in your life, there's been a bottle like these. Maybe it's already a memory, a wine that survived something or surprised you or tasted like somebody you loved. Maybe it's still waiting on the side in the dark for the table that deserves it. I want to hear about it. Write to The Kosher Terroir and tell me your iconic bottle, the wine, the people, and the moment that made it unforgettable. The bottle, the people, the moment, all 3, because as tonight taught us, they don't come apart. And if there's a bottle you're keeping for someone, for a child, for a friend, for a table that hasn't happened yet, do me one favor. Next time you walk past it, mention it kindly. It's allowed to hear. I'm Simon Jacob. This has been the Kosher Terroir. L'chaim to the bottles that carry our stories. And to the people who open them with us. This is Simon Jacob again, your host of today's episode of The Kosher Teruah. 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.