The Kosher Terroir

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A single word in a 1663 diary entry kicks off a chase that still drives collectors, winemakers, and anyone who’s ever tasted a bottle that stopped them cold: “particular.” Samuel Pepys drinks Haut-Brion in a London tavern and writes down something new, not just that it’s good, but that it tastes like Bordeaux. From that moment, we follow the birth of terroir, reputation, and the myths we inherit when we talk about “the great wines of the past.” 

We walk through Burgundy’s earliest quality crackdown, when Philip the...

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There’s a particular kind of regret that only shows up in a well-stocked wine cellar: the bottle you were thrilled to buy, then walked past for years because tonight never felt “important” enough. 

From Jerusalem, I start with a real bottle on my desk, a Yarden Cabernet Sauvignon 2003 from Golan Heights Winery, grown in volcanic basalt soils and built to last, and I use it to ask a tougher question than “what should I drink?” Are we buying wine for the life we actually lead, or for the lif...

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An email promised, “your next favorite wine is waiting,” and I decided not to accept that line without a map. From Jerusalem, we tell a story most wine drinkers recognize: the one about the dependable kosher bottle we buy again and again because it never lets you down, and the quiet downside of that success. Familiar starts to taste like “better,” even when it just tastes like home, and the wine world’s usual advice (“try something new”) is an excellent suggestion with no instructions on how, what, or why. 

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A single mix-up call sends Michael Kay to a champagne facility as a last-minute kosher supervisor, and by the grace of Ha'Shem, that becomes the start of a new life in wine. I sit down with Michael, founder of Invei, to unpack how a former book editor builds a serious California kosher winery out of a garage, sources fruit from vineyards he doesn’t own, and still manages to make bottles that surprise even experienced drinkers.

We get specific about the craft: how Michael evaluates growers, why ta...

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A winemaker can spend decades learning how to shape a wine, so what happens when kosher restrictions limit which wines you taste? From Jerusalem, I sit down with Ari Gotthelf, a kosher wine producer, importer, and consultant who has made it his mission to bring the worlds terroir into the kosher market without watering down the identity of the place, the grapes, or the winery behind it. 

We talk about the hidden work behind every kosher bottle: reaching out to dozens of wineries, earning trust across cultures, a...

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Israel is smaller than New Jersey and yet it may be one of the most quickly changing wine landscapes you can drive across in a single day. That’s why Israel’s first official wine region map matters, and why we wanted to go straight to someone who helped draw it. 

We’re joined by Noa Maoz, an agronomist and viticulturist who served on the professional committee behind the map, alongside Ministry of Agriculture experts and specialists working with soil science, climate forecasting, and GIS mapping. We dig int...

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Your Rosh Hashanah wine choice can either fight the table or join it. When the holiday is already teaching your mouth sweetness through apple and honey, a bone-dry “serious” bottle can accidentally miss the emotional and spiritual assignment. So we make a counterintuitive move: we let the wine geek lose on purpose and we learn how to choose sweet wine that feels grown up, balanced, and deeply aligned with the night’s meaning. 

We start with Nehemiah 8, where a weeping crowd hears Torah and finally understands. The leaders...

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There’s a line many of us race past every morning in Pitum Haketoret, and once you hear it, you can’t unhear it: Yain Kafrisin. Wine. Not for Kiddush, not for libations, not even to taste, but to soak a stubborn spice so the holiest incense in Judaism can rise as a cloud of fragrance on Yom Kippur. I’m Simon Jacob, and from Jerusalem I follow that one word into an ancient debate and a very modern High Holidays lesson. 

We treat the ketoret text like a...

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What makes a wine iconic? I’m not asking about the bottle that impressed a critic or the one that cost so much your kids stared at you. I mean the wine you can still describe decades later, with your hands moving, because it welded itself to a moment in your life. Tonight I open my own cellar and my family’s stories to chase the answer, starting with a case that survived a basement flood and still poured like a powerhouse.

Along the way, I make the...

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I did something to a bottle of red wine that would horrify a marketing department: I took away its name. No grape. No country. No vintage. Just a covered bottle and an honest glass, because I want to see what happens when we stop tasting labels and start tasting wine.

We move through five structured wine tasting frameworks, each one sharper than the last. First comes the three-step table method you can do quietly at a Shabbat meal: look, smell, taste. Then we get serious about the...

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A bulldozer pauses outside Tel Aviv, and the ground opens up into a buried industrial city of wine. Under a soccer field in Yavne, archaeologists uncover five massive wine presses, warehouses, kilns, and tens of thousands of amphorae, pointing to an output of two to three million liters a year around 500 CE. It’s the kind of scale we associate with modern wineries, except it ran on sandaled feet, gravity, and an export machine that reached across the Mediterranean.

From there we follow the most famous wine yo...

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Two bottles for five dollars used to be the whole story of kosher wine in America and for many of us, it was the taste of Friday night. Then a Berkeley winery released a kosher Cabernet Sauvignon that Decanter scored at a perfect 100 points, no polite caveats, no “for a kosher wine,” full stop. That single number forces a bigger question: how did we get from Concord sweetness on newsprint to a bottle that can stand with the world’s best?

We trace the real mechanics behind the sh...

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A week after Tisha B’Av, I’m holding a glass of wine and asking the question you’re not “supposed” to ask out loud: are we ready for the Third Temple? Not because I want a political brawl about red heifers or headlines, but because the very fact that the question triggers a fight is already a clue. Our sages pin the Second Temple’s fall on sinat chinam, baseless hatred, which means the real obstacle was never engineering. It was relationship failure, and it can happen even in a generat...

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The loudest moment at a Jewish wedding isn’t the music. It’s the crack of a glass and the cheer that detonates right on top of it. From Jerusalem, I slow that moment down until it finally makes sense, especially during the Nine Days leading to Tisha B’Av, when Jewish mourning strips away the very tools we use to build connection: weddings, wine, and even the greeting of shalom.

Under the chuppah, we count three vessels. Two cups of wine create union: Kiddushin, the act of bei...

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Garlic in gin sounds like a mistake until you lean in, take a breath, and realize it smells like home cooking. From the Judean Hills, Tavlin Distillery is building a kosher craft gin that treats botanicals like a kitchen language and terroir like more than soil. I sit down with co-founders Eli and Amir to unpack how a Los Angeles finance guy and a Jerusalem educator with a sommelier-level nose turn a neighborly friendship into a serious Israeli distilling business.

We start with the story that sets...

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A glass door on Agrippa Street hides two towering copper stills and a claim Jerusalem has never been able to make before: a working distillery in the heart of the city. I sit down with Michael Ginnosaur, CEO of Thinkers Distillery, to unpack how a brand can be unapologetically Jerusalem and still chase world-class standards in vodka, gin, and bourbon.

We get concrete about what separates a premium spirit from a souvenir bottle. Michael lays out the three essentials: the liquid, the packaging, and the narrative, then...

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The strangest release date for a wine podcast might be a fast day and that’s exactly the point. I start with the sound of wine meeting the bottom of a glass, then I ask you to leave the glass empty as the Seventeenth of Tammuz arrives. Not as a gimmick, but as a way to remember the day Jerusalem’s daily Temple offering broke, when the lambs could no longer come and the wine libation, the nesachim, went dry. When the wine stopped, the singing stopped too, and a st...

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Old vines. High altitude. Native Spanish grapes. If those words grab you, pour a glass and come with us to Valencia, where winemaker Armando from Viña  Memorias walks us through a kosher wine tasting that’s equal parts sensory and deeply practical. We’re chasing a specific style: kosher wines that stay light on their feet without losing structure, and wines that make sense in hot weather because they’re built for it.

We get into why Bobal from older vineyards tends toward larger clusters, greater ripeness...

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We boil wine on purpose and then argue about whether it’s ruined. That tension sits at the heart of mevushal, the “cooked” kosher wine category that some drinkers dismiss, some skeptics call a loophole, and every caterer quietly relies on to make a wedding run. From Jerusalem, I walk you through why Jewish law treats wine differently from almost every other food: a bottle can be perfectly kosher by ingredients and still change status based only on who touches it.

We put the law and the wine o...

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You’re about to watch a wine snob inside your head lose the argument, one delicious “heresy” at a time. From Jerusalem, I’m Simon Jacob, and I’m making the case that the most respectful way to love wine is to use the right bottle for the right moment, including the messy, loud, sun-soaked moments where pitchers and ice belong on the table. Yes, we even go straight at the taboo: cola in red wine, and why it’s technically defensible.

We start by drawing a clean line b...

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A masked man on the cover of Wine Spectator helps spark a revolution, and that single image becomes our doorway into a bigger claim: every famous wine rebellion has a kosher twin, and sometimes the kosher world gets there first. From Jerusalem, I take you on a guided tour through the nicknames that built modern wine culture and use each one to ask the question nobody seems to ask out loud: where is the kosher version of this story?

We start with California’s Rhone Rangers and th...

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A friend brings me a heavy bottle from Georgia, and the first thing it teaches us is that weight can be a message. When I pour the wine, the color is almost opaque, purple-black with a stained magenta rim, and it becomes a clue that leads straight into one of the oldest winemaking traditions on Earth: Georgian qvevri wine, fermented and aged in an egg-shaped clay vessel buried in the ground.

From there, I take you back to archaeology and scripture, because Georgia and the land of...

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You can watch a winemaker in a vineyard for five minutes and learn the real secret: they don’t spend most of their time looking at the grapes. They look down at the dirt. From Jerusalem, I’m taking you underground to the place where kosher wine is actually made, in the topsoil, subsoil, bedrock, and the living microbiome that turns geology into something you can feel on your tongue. 

We walk through the vineyard’s layers, then travel across the three rock families. Volcanic igneous soils like th...

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Most people have a “kosher wine” picture stuck in their head: sweet, syrupy, and only for ritual use. From the floor of a live kosher wine tasting, we go straight at that stereotype by asking winemakers, importers, and wine pros to name the one myth they’d love to kill and then proving the point with specific bottles, regions, and real production details.

We talk about what actually drives quality: where the grapes come from, how the vintner works, and why a great kosher wine can be every...

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Chardonnay has been mislabeled as predictable for so long that a lot of wine lovers stopped tasting it with fresh eyes. We’re changing that by treating Chardonnay like what it really is: a translator for place and a scoreboard for decisions in the cellar. From my window in Jerusalem, we trace how limestone, clay, and volcanic basalt can reshape the same grape into radically different expressions, whether it’s a mineral-driven Judean Hills white or a fog-cooled California bottle from Russian River Valley or Chalk Hill. 

We di...

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Amphora has been one of those names that instantly signals ultra-premium Israeli wine. For kosher wine lovers, it has also been the ultimate “so close, yet so far” winery, respected from a distance but missing from the Shabbat table. That gap finally closes as Amphora launches its first kosher lineup: four new wines released under the Samuel label, and we get the rare chance to visit the estate, tour the facilities, and taste all four.

We talk through what it actually takes to make serious kosher wine with...

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A giant has fallen, and we’ve been tasting his influence for years without always knowing his name. From Bordeaux to Napa to the Upper Galilee, Michel Rolland helped define the modern red wine profile so many of us now treat as “normal” — deep color, lush fruit, and tannins that feel like velvet instead of sandpaper. If you’ve ever opened a premium kosher Cabernet or a kosher Bordeaux run and wondered why it’s so polished right out of the gate, the answer often lives in the cellar’s quiet relati...

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We dig into the art and science of wine aeration, including the two chemical forces that change everything: evaporation and controlled oxidation. We break down “bottle stink” and why reduced sulfur aromas blow off fast, then explain how oxygen helps tannins polymerize so astringency softens and fruit and floral esters finally show up. We also draw a clear line between aerating wine and decanting wine, since one is about oxygen exposure and the other is often about separating sediment.

Because this is kosher wine, we tackle the Mavu...

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Four cups of wine feels simple until you try to choose the bottles, pace the night, pair the food, and keep everyone happy at the table. Then someone asks the question hiding in plain sight: what about the fifth cup, and why does Elijah get his own glass? From Jerusalem, we sit down with Jay Buchsbaum, Director of Wine Education at Royal Wine Corporation, to make the Passover Seder make sense both as halacha and as a real-world kosher wine plan you can actually pull off. 

We d...

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Your whisky cabinet is locked for Passover, but that doesn’t mean your glass has to get boring. From Jerusalem, I take you on a guided journey into kosher brandy as the spirit that actually makes sense for the holiday, not as a backup plan, but as wine’s most concentrated expression of place. We start by clearing up the labels that confuse even seasoned drinkers, then build a simple framework you can use in any liquor store aisle.

We travel from Cognac’s chalk and limestone “white fi...

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A lot of spirits talk about “botanicals,” but then you read the label and realize it’s mostly neutral alcohol plus flavoring. We wanted to taste something built the hard way. From Jerusalem, we sit down with Dr. Ronen Yehuda of Tibra to explore what he calls the pinnacle of clean distillation and why real fermentation and distilling from botanicals creates a different kind of clarity in the glass.

We walk through three standout liqueurs designed to be both premium and deeply traditional: a crisp anise spirit that p...

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What if the grape built for our warming world was created in a French lab in 1961, forgotten for decades, then reborn as a Mediterranean powerhouse? We follow Marcellan’s improbable arc—from a small-berry “failure” to a climate-ready red redefining terroir across continents—and taste why winemakers now swear by its color, balance, and velvet tannins.

We start with the origin story at INRA in Languedoc, where Cabernet Sauvignon met Grenache on purpose. The result slept through the age of high-yield table wine, only to shine in the 1990s...

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We sat down with our friend Elk and Yossi Polak, CEO of Meshik Achiya, to explore how Shiloh’s ancient limestone hills shape extra virgin olive oil just as clearly as terroir shapes wine. With a tasting flight on the table, we learned the craft from the inside out—why you warm a blue cup in your palm, how stripaggio unlocks aroma, and what that peppery cough really means about polyphenols, freshness, and quality.

Yossi walked us through five distinct expressions, from Picual’s fresh-cut herb profile to the...

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From Jerusalem on the cusp of Purim, we share a clear, no-nonsense guide to celebrating responsibly—hydration, food, real rest, and zero driving—then follow the holiday’s deeper current: turning fear into courage and surface into substance.

Our tour begins with wines that delight in misdirection to reveal a truer center. Eli Shiran blends Carignan, Petite Sirah, and Petit Verdot from distant Israeli terroirs, a floral nose opening into dark spice—a hidden map of the land in a single bottle. The Pinto family rewrites Negev dogma wi...

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We take you on a fast, flavorful tour of terroir—where soil, climate, and human choices turn grapes into recordings of place and time—and show you how to hear the song each wine is singing. Along the way, we decode labels, separate grape character from winemaking technique, and build a practical tasting vocabulary you can use the next time you open a bottle.

We start with whites and clear the fog around Chardonnay, contrasting Chablis’ steel and oyster-shell bite with buttery, oak-kissed styles shaped by malolactic fermen...

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Ever wonder why the same wine tastes flat one night and thrilling the next? We slow the pace, strip out the snobbery, and show how small choices—rim thickness, bowl shape, headspace, and temperature—unlock a bottle’s soul. From the first quiet nose to the final echo of the finish, we walk through a clear, repeatable method that turns drinking into true tasting.

Then we correct serving myths. Fridge-cold whites go numb; let them wake at 50°F. Modern “room temperature” cooks reds; a short chill to 60–65°F tightens tan...

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Four words change everything: “The seeds are brown.” From that moment, we trade weather apps and pruning shears for clipboards, tank maps, and a race against heat, rot, and the calendar. We walk you through the split-second calls that can turn a year of work into greatness or disappointment, and why kosher winemaking adds a layer of choreography few outside the cellar ever see.

We start at veraison, when grapes shift from camouflage to sugar magnets, and the whole world wants a bite—boars smashing fences, jackals chewin...

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Welcome back to The Kosher Terroir –Vineyard Creation Step by Step Part 2

Last week we stood on a bare, scrubby hillside. There was nothing here but potential and risk. Now? Look around.

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Start with a blank hillside and imagine building flavor from the ground up. That’s our approach as we step into the vineyard and treat terroir like architecture—every choice about climate, soil, genetics, and geometry locked in for decades, with no cellar fix to save a bad foundation. With the added weight of Orla delaying fruit for years, kosher wine demands that we get the blueprint right before a single root touches the soil.

We zoom out to Macro Terroir and translate climate into chemistry using grow...

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What if the most important flavor in your glass isn’t because of the grape variety, but the choices made in the cellar? We pull back the curtain on the winemaker’s toolbox and walk through twelve pivotal moments that can turn identical grapes into wildly different wines—one a velvet cloak, another a sharp suit of armor. From the first clip at harvest to the final stir of lees, we map the forks in the road that define aroma, texture, and age-worthiness.

We start with the pickin...