Goliath, Foraging, and an Answer
Hide our ignorance as we will,
an evening of wine soon reveals it.
— Heraclitus, ca. 500 BC
I arrived in Israel again just as a colossal, early September sandstorm smothered the entire region. Flights were cancelled, children stayed home from school, paramedics ministered to hundreds of people in respiratory distress, and Jerusalem reported air pollution levels 173 times higher than normal. I wanted see if Cremisan was surviving, struggling, or thriving. Deep down I also hoped for one more chance at understanding the red Cremisan wine that had captivated me in the hotel room years before. Now I loved their white wines, but the new red didn’t have any of the spiciness or earthiness I remembered. Something had changed, beyond just the winemaker.
I also planned to go on a foraging expedition with food historian Uri Mayer-Chissick, whom I’d met in Israel the previous spring, and tour the archaeological dig at Gath, Goliath’s hometown, with Aren Maeir, the archeologist I had met on Emek Refaim Street. Which was perfect, because I still wanted more of a feel for what ancient life was like in the region.
For a few days the sandstorm had me worried. The haze of biblical proportions was relentless, but it finally blew over. Mayer-Chissick gave the green light, and said the storm told a lesson about the past, too. People could know how and when to forage only with detailed local knowledge: which plants were tasty, when and where they were abundant, and even names for all of that in order to communicate the risks and rewards to other members of a tribe or culture. “You need to see what’s around you. If it’s too hot, if you have a dust storm, you change plans,” he said. The same was true for ancient winemaking, I thought.
Mayer-Chissick’s wife, Tali, inspired his food career. Years earlier he started cooking for her; then he wanted to know more about where food comes from and what people ate throughout history. His academic and personal interests have grown into a family business. The couple now offers a variety of programs and events that promote healthy eating and healthy communities. He believes solutions can come from Jews, Arabs, and Christians, together, since they share many of the same foods.
We were headed to the Biriya Forest, a national park in Upper Galilee, but there was a local bounty at the kibbutz, too. Date palms were loaded with bunches of fruit, free for the taking. I eagerly filled a bag with two varieties. They were like fruit-honey bombs, exploding with flavor.
Most Jewish holidays are connected with agricultural traditions, such as the planting season or the fall harvest, Mayer-Chissick said, and many Mishnayot (religious common law) refer to specific ways to handle food or wine. That kind of knowledge helped people survive in ancient times. I mentioned that some experts claimed that ancient wine was all bad, partly because of spoilage and contamination. Not true, he said. Ancient people spent a lot of time figuring out how to store and preserve food. The soft limestone of the region was perfect for creating underground cellars, cool in summer and warm in winter. Jews also had specific guidelines for how to handle wine, since grapes are considered one of the original seven biblical foods mentioned in Deuteronomy.
We arrived at the forest before the others who had signed up for the trip. Mayer-Chissick immediately set off to look for food, and I followed. One grove of figs had lost most of their fruit, but some had dried on the tree, leaving chewy pieces to snack on. A wild fennel plant was nearby, and we plucked off pieces. A carob tree still had tasty pods, despite the heat.
Sharoni Shafir, a researcher of bees at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, arrived for the tour with his wife and three children. He lamented that local food traditions were in danger of vanishing in Israel, so it’s important to conserve not only biological diversity but also genetic and cultural diversity. Shafir wanted his children to see the bounty that nature provided, and to know how people of the region used to gather food, before such skills are forgotten.
When the whole group was assembled, we trooped around the forest. Children climbed up walnut trees to pluck nuts, and used stones to break them open. We found wild capers, pistachio trees, Palestinian buckthorn berries, sumac seeds, pine nuts, and a few fruits that weren’t ripe yet, such as spicy hawthorn berries and olives. Mayer-Chissick combined the haul—mostly spices and flavorings in this case—with lunch cooked over an open fire.
Everyone left happy, but on the ride back to the kibbutz Mayer-Chissick and I commiserated about the challenges of preserving local foods or wines. “We’re ruining the traditions. We’re losing all the knowledge that was gathered in thousands of years. In the last few years people are talking more about healthy food, local food. But it’s very, very slow in Israel. We have a lot of work to do,” he said.
That helped explain why at one point Cremisan was the only winery using local grapes. A longtime resident of the kibbutz later provided more insight. Until the 1970s, Israel was still a relatively poor country, worried more about survival than wine. Many of the people who helped found the country after World War II had fled from Europe, so they were used to those wines, not strange Middle Eastern grapes. As the country prospered, young people drifted away from the rural kibbutz lifestyle. Modern, urban life was more attractive, and frankly, easier. It reminded me of what José Vouillamoz said about the younger Swiss, that they didn’t want to work in the fields or the vineyards.
Mayer-Chissick is trying to rekindle awareness of rural life with all sorts of different projects. There is a plan to renovate the ancient market district in the city of Lod, which has been plagued by poverty and violence. An environmental park is in the works just a few miles away in Jordan. “We need to talk to them. Cooperate. Get to know them,” he said of Jordanians. “I think that’s a very, very good way to connect with neighbors. The same land grows the same fruits and vegetables, and the land has the traditions. I think that the local traditions, they don’t really belong to the people, they belong to the land.”
I felt the same way about native grapes.
The last thing I expected to see outside Cremisan’s winery was a tour bus, but there it was. Thirty or forty Brits streamed out, pale as if they were in London. Three Norwegians arrived from Bethlehem by cab. Winemaker Laith Kokaly and agronomist Fadi Batarseh, both Palestinians, greeted everyone in the main bottling room. It was all encouragingly normal. Cremisan was behaving like a business. A dignified, silver-haired man said he greatly enjoys the wine, and was surprised to find Palestinians making it.
The group tour was set up by Cremisan’s British distributor, Della Shenton. I introduced myself as people took pictures and listened to Kokaly describe the winery. Shenton, in her fifties, wore big glasses and had a friendly, to-the-point personality. In 2005 she began selling Cremisan wines to restaurants, stores, and churches in the United Kingdom, when the monastery started exporting beyond the Middle East. Shenton acknowledged that in the beginning Cremisan had many problems filling orders: “We’d be promised the shipment, say, in February and it would arrive in June.”
The winery tour finished and we moved to the new gift shop, packed with people tasting samples and buying bottles. “I feel far more confident now than I did,” Shenton continued. “I’ve seen the quality improve enormously. I can now confidently spread the word in England. Until now I’ve tended not to do a proactive marketing. People have come to me.” I mentioned Ottolenghi, the famous restaurant whose sommelier had praised Cremisan wines. “Yes, I sell to them,” she said with a smile.
I launched into my rambling story of accidentally tasting the wine in the hotel room. After so many years I didn’t really expect to understand why the mysterious old red vintage was so distinctive, while the new red isn’t. It turned out that Shenton had known Father Ermenegildo Lamon, the old winemaker, who had come to the region from Italy in 1949. He learned about the local grapes from an even older generation.
“He was a wonderful, elderly Salesian, who was the winemaker and the wine master. And what he didn’t know about wine growing here and wine production here wasn’t worth knowing. However, he kept all his knowledge in his head. No spreadsheets, there was nothing written down,” she said with regret in her voice. “But it of course meant that it was difficult to pass this information on. And sadly, when he became ill, he developed Alzheimer’s, then Parkinson’s, [and] had to go back to Italy. That was a very tough time for the winery. They actually had to throw away a lot of wine. Because they didn’t know what the heck was in the barrels.” Riccardo Cotarella and the Italian winemakers came in with a whole package of support and funding, saving Cremisan. But some traditions died, too. Monks no longer made the wine.
These pieces of information made me almost woozy. I now understood why the red wine from my hotel room didn’t taste like Cremisan’s new red. Father Lamon never got to pass his knowledge on to Laith Kokaly and Fadi Batarseh, today’s winemakers. All the DNA, mass spectrometry, and liquid chromatography testing in the world wouldn’t bring back the wine I’d tasted. Father Lamon made wine for more than fifty years, and as far as I can tell, not a single wine critic or publication ever interviewed him.
I realized where the earthy flavors I’d tasted years before had gone, too. Cremisan’s old fermentation vats were lined in concrete—a once popular style that went out of fashion when stainless steel arrived. Concrete breathes differently than steel, and can become a home to distinctive microbial communities. It gives wine an almost amphora- or qvevri-like minerality. Some boutique California wineries are now going back to concrete fermentation.
But I learned that Cremisan stopped using the concrete vats after Cotarella began advising, removing that distinctive taste. Shenton told me the old winemaker had also done a lot of blending with grapes such as Alicante, which could explain the spicy notes I remembered. The new Cremisan red didn’t use that grape.
My hotel room wine was gone, and I felt . . . relieved. All the reading I’d done on the psychology of taste suggested that remembering flavors is tricky, anyway. Yet finally I knew that the wine had actually changed, and I had, too. I now paid attention to details such as the concrete vats. Putting all the pieces together, I recalled something from the previous spring that hadn’t made sense at the time.
Winemaker Yiftah Perets works at Binyamina Winery, one of Israel’s largest. He loves ancient grape history, too, and has studied the Cremisan grapes, Israel’s wild grapes, and archaeological wine remains. Perets had spoken excitedly of trying to taste wines and grapes that King David, Socrates, or others drank in the past. “Wine is a free spirit and it has its own rules. For me it’s a piece of history. And this is what drives me. I found the past very relevant—always. [But] for me it’s not the past, it’s the future.”
That clicked. Without realizing it, my thoughts were working in the same way as they bounced from the six-thousand-year-old Armenian cave to questions about present and future wines. Understanding the past was my way of understanding the present.
I said good-bye to everyone at Cremisan, headed back to Jerusalem, and prepared to visit the ancient city of Gath. I wanted to see how archaeobiology works in the field.
Aren Maeir walked up a modest, dusty, and to my eyes, seemingly barren slope. “We’re standing on what probably [are] the remains of one tower of the city gate. That means just below the surface, there are Iron Age remains just waiting to be excavated,” Maeir said. Parts of Gath, Goliath’s supposed hometown, were under my feet. History, buried beneath millennia of dirt and dust. The only sound was the background buzz of insects, birds, and a far-off power plant. Blue sky silhouetted a hill where the Philistines flourished four thousand years ago.
As we walked around the mostly hidden ruins of Gath’s lower city, I asked Maeir how hi-tech tools had changed his work. He likened basic archaeology to a jigsaw puzzle with ten thousand pieces—but you only had three hundred of them. And there was no picture on the cover of the box to go by, he added with a laugh. It’s like comparing medicine of the 1800s to the present. In both cases doctors want to help their patients, but now MRIs can pinpoint disease.
“Some of the things we’re excavating [now] we didn’t even know existed twenty or thirty years ago,” Maeir said. “We’ve moved into being able to look at the micro-view of the ancient remains. I would say our image of the Philistines as the archenemies of the Israelite Judites is perhaps not exactly the case. Right over here, we excavated a temple, from the tenth or ninth century [BC].” Maeir pointed to what looked like a hole in the ground next to an old stone wall. “Right next to this altar, among all the various objects that were offered to this temple, we found a jar which was made of clay from the Jerusalem area. And on this jar there was an inscription, a name, a Judite name. So that means that probably someone from the area of Jerusalem brought a jar to this Philistine temple.” The telling detail of the clay’s origin came from a process called thin section petrography, which uses a tiny sample slice to analyze its structure.
Teams at Gath have found sets of wine vessels from the city’s heyday in about 2000 BC, along with many artifacts that suggest commerce and daily life in the distant past were more complex than we had known. Researchers used mass spectrometry to analyze the Philistine plaster, and were surprised to find that it came from Greece. DNA samples from ancient pig bones yielded a whole new narrative, too. “The pigs the Philistines used were pigs that were [originally] brought from Europe,” Maeir said. “We would have had no ability to know that [before]. Things like this really add depth and color—put some flesh on the bones—of the story we’re telling.”
In 2013 Israeli researchers found traces of cinnamon and other exotic spices on three-thousand-year-old pottery at Dor, a coastal city that traded with Egypt, Greece, and other nations. Maeir said the molecular analysis precisely matched the residue to cinnamon from India, even though it can be found much closer, in Africa. “We have this image of people in antiquity living just in their little village in their immediate surroundings. But things came from really far away—much farther than we assumed. So there’s a very, very long-range trade in various types of materials, which played an important role in daily life, and in ritual.”
We walked down the slope towards a dry streambed. “I think the parallel perhaps is the Israelis and the Palestinians today. On the one hand, there is a conflict. But on the other hand we live together, we work together, we eat the same food, we dress the same way, we have the same humor,” Maeir said.
Mayer-Chissick expressed the same sentiment, and I thought that over after I left Gath and returned home. All of those years earlier, why had I so severely questioned The Oxford Companion to Wine claim that the Holy Land lacked vineyards for most of the last fourteen hundred years? Perhaps because I knew from all my travels that people in the Middle East, and all over the world, aren’t so one-dimensional.
Much of the Cremisan mystery was solved, at least in my mind, though Shivi Drori’s team still hadn’t published its final scientific paper on how those grapes might fit into the family tree of wine grape evolution. I would wait for that answer, but now it was time for the next stop on wine’s migratory route: Italy.