The Kosher Terroir

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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 ...

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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, ba...

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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 sha...

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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 no...

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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 separa...

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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 libat...

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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 i...

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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 c...

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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 straig...

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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: w...

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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....

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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 tong...

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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 abo...

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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 e...

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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 v...

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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 Cabern...

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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 wi...

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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 sens...

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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 sim...