Coming Home, and Holy Land Wine
. . . look down from heaven, and behold, and visit this vine . . .
—Psalm 80:14 (KJV)
My last wine trip to the Middle East ended in the late summer of 2015, seven years after the hotel room tasting. I stopped in Manhattan first and headed downtown on a rainy fall day, to a tasting at Astor Wines & Spirits in Greenwich Village. I went up a flight of stairs into a room filled with sommeliers and wine buyers. They staked out places at tables, sniffing, swirling, and mostly spitting out samples from dozens of bottles, as usual—except all the wines were Georgian.
The chilly rain had fogged the high, arched windows of the historic building, and I tried an unusual glass of white wine. Intensely golden and cloudy, like raw cider, it was wildly different, conjuring up visions of a woodsman drinking in a mountain forest, or perhaps the people in that ancient cave. It came from a small family vineyard, and the label featured a simple drawing of six heads—men and women—with the name “Our Wine.” The pourer, a Georgian man, started to explain their wine history. I smiled and said, “Oh, I’ve been to your country.” He looked surprised.
How did such a homespun creation made its way to New York? Seeing Lisa Granik, a Master of Wine who organized the tasting, I asked if this event could have happened ten years ago. “Absolutely not,” she said, adding that until recently American consumers weren’t ready for such diversity, and Georgian producers didn’t grasp our market either. I took another sip of the earthy wine and for a second, it felt like a taste of the past.
Granick is a former Fulbright scholar and Georgetown Law graduate, and one of only a few dozen Americans certified as Masters of Wine, the most prestigious title in the field. Worldwide there are just three hundred and fifty-five MWs, all of whom must pass a difficult multi-year program first developed by London’s Worshipful Company of Vintners, a guild that received a Royal Charter in 1363. After the tasting, I called Granik to follow up on why she thought New Yorkers were paying attention to once obscure wines. She said people are seeking new varieties, new producers, and new stories, particularly in urban areas; that meant looking at lesser-known regions. There is a generational shift, too. “[People] are interested in exploring wines that are different from the ones they thought their parents drank.” She doesn’t expect Rkatsiteli to replace Riesling, but now it has a place in the market.
Months after the event I went to Astor’s website, wanting more of the rustic “Our Wine.” This is how the staff described it: “Amber-colored and not for the uninitiated . . . Quite tannic and dry as a bone, one could only recommend this wine for the adventurous.” The notes add that “If this wine were a pop song it might be called ‘Take a Walk on the Wild Side,’ ‘Crazy,’ or perhaps ‘Livin’ la Vida Loca!’ . . . What you don’t get is a light, crisp, fun white quaffer; what you do get is big, firm, earthy, tannic (yes I said tannic), nutty monster of a wine that probably lives under your bed!” Then the notice: out of stock. Eight of the ten Georgian wines Astor listed at that time were sold out. Granik was right—there are more adventurous wine drinkers in the world than we might think. Now I was one of them.
In the fall of 2015 the fourth edition of The Oxford Companion to Wine came out, with a revision to acknowledge that Israel does in fact have native grape varieties, and that Cremisan was making wine from them. After I queried the editors, they also decided to correct the mistaken suggestion that winemaking in the region vanished for much of the period between AD 636 and the late 1800s. I admit to feeling vindicated, and suspect future editions will mention Drori’s research, and even more Israeli grape varieties.
Around the same time I wrote a travel story about Cremisan for the Associated Press. It ran in papers and websites all over the world, with the headline “Palestinian winemakers preserve ancient traditions.” That November the New York Times profiled an Israeli wine inspired by Shivi Drori’s research, and that got even more attention. Ido Lewinsohn, vintner at Recanati Winery at the time, explained why they decided to use Arabic, Hebrew, and English lettering on the label for the new wine, stating that the grapes “are not Israeli; they are not Palestinian. They belong to the region—this is something beautiful.” Lewinsohn later told me that Recanati had American distribution for the wine, and a red wine made from native grapes is in the works, too. In December CNN.com featured both the Israeli and Palestinian wines under the headline “What would Jesus drink?”
“Things definitely got pretty busy last fall when the press hit, mostly ‘where can I buy it’ type of emails,” Jason Bajalia, Cremisan’s American distributor, wrote me in an email. “We are in pretty much every Israeli restaurant in NYC now. That wouldn’t mean anything anywhere else, but there are so many in NYC (and high profile ones) that it is a significant development!”
Cremisan was no longer obscure. I chilled out for a bit, and considered how the hotel room wine ultimately set me off like a viticultural Quixote, traveling ancient wine routes, championing obscure grapes and railing against the glut of famous French varieties. I hadn’t seen that coming.
It was time to read and reflect. Rod Phillips, who wrote the essay about French wine myths, had a new book out titled French Wine: A History. It had plenty of love and respect for great winemaking, but expanded the myth busting beyond terroir. The reassuring claim that many vineyards in that country go back to the fourteenth or fifteenth century?
It appeals to our sense of lineage, stability, and tradition, all powerful and positive associations. [Yet vineyards] in many French regions were devastated by the Black Death from the mid-1300s and the Hundred Years’ War to the mid-1400s, and by the frigid winters of 1693 and especially 1709 . . . [In fact] despite more than 2,000 years of developing a wine industry and wine culture, French producers settled on varieties and locations as recently as many New World producers . . . the idea of an uninterrupted narrative, linking modern French wine to the distant past, is on very shaky ground.
And the magnificent, noble grapes the world has fallen so hard for? “[U]ntil recently, French wines were field blends, made from several varieties picked simultaneously so that the grapes were variously green, ripe, overripe, and rotten. They were crushed and vinified together, the must was fermented in open tanks for weeks, and the wine was stored in dirty barrels,” Phillips wrote.
Well OK, I thought. Are there any other cherished wine myths left to challenge? One soon came to mind.
I had obsessed over the Oxford Companion claim that wine vanished from the Holy Land for roughly a thousand years, but kind of ignored the second half of the passage: that Baron Edmond de Rothschild sparked a winemaking revival there in the 1880s. There is no question Rothschild had a huge impact on winemaking and agriculture in what was then called Palestine, but I suddenly realized his influence wasn’t all positive. Rothschild was blinded by the myth of French noble grapes. In the early 1880s one of Rothschild’s wine experts praised the winemaking potential of existing Palestinian grapes, but the project favored classic French varieties instead. One historian notes that between 1884 and 1886 there was “a great deal of uprooting of the ancient indigenous vines.” Rothschild had essentially ignored grapes that were perhaps historically linked to the Jewish religion. More than 120 years passed before Shivi Drori and his team began studying and saving native vines. To me the Rothschild wine story seems to illustrate a broader point: Mizrahi Jews in Israel trace their heritage to other Middle Eastern countries, Ashkenazi Jews came from Europe, and there is an ongoing dispute about whether Mizrahi heritage (and links to Middle Eastern food and traditions) are overlooked.
I thought over that contradiction while reading, often with a smile, a collection titled A Miniature Anthology of Medieval Hebrew Wine Songs. One of my favorites was by Samuel the Nagid, whose motto seemed to be pray hard but party hard, too:
Don’t speculate on hidden things; leave that
To God, the Hidden One, whose eyes sees all.
But send the lass who plays the lute
To fill the cup with coral drink,
Put up in kegs in Adam’s time,
Or else just after Noah’s flood,
A pungent wine, like frankincense,
A glittering wine, like gold and gems,
Such wine as concubines and queens
Would bring King David long ago.
Reading the medieval Jewish poets brought me to a final reckoning about Holy Land wine during that era. The biggest exodus of Jews between AD 1000 and 1600 wasn’t from Muslim lands, but from Spain and other European countries. Many settled in the Ottoman Empire. In 1453 Sultan Mehmet II openly courted Jewish immigrants with this proclamation: “Who among you of all my people that is with me, may his G-d be with him, let him ascend to Istanbul, the site of my imperial throne. Let him dwell in the best of the land, each beneath his vine and beneath his fig tree, with silver and with gold, with wealth and with cattle. Let him dwell in the land, trade in it, and take possession of it.”
Some Ottoman rulers actually partnered with Jews in the wine business, as a way to raise money through taxes and exports. Around 1552 Sultan Suleiman I brought the Jewish House of Mendès into the royal fold, including the Jewish diplomat Don Joseph Nasi. In 1566 Selim II (aka Selim the Sot) became sultan, and he gave Nasi control over a vast system of wine production and export, in Ottoman territories throughout the Aegean, Cyprus, and the Middle East. Historian Avigdor Levy found that Nasi made an estimated fifteen thousand ducats a year from the wine trade. I found records from Cyprus showing that more than 150,000 cases were exported to Venice and London between 1746 and 1770. Parts of the Middle East kept a flourishing export business, even under Ottoman rule. That suggests far more than occasional wine drinking.
The whole situation made me reflect. The original Oxford Companion claims that captured my attention, about wine vanishing from Israel and the lack of local grapes, symbolized something bigger about the wine industry: the long tradition of exaggerating the superiority of French wine grapes. Ernest Hemingway coined an insightful word in A Farewell to Arms: “I had drunk much wine and afterward coffee and Strega and I explained, winefully, how we did not do the things we wanted to do; we never did such things.” (Emphasis mine.)
To be honest, my hotel room wine, though real, contained a significant portion of winefullness. I daydreamed about ancient wine before I even knew what it was, and that realization made me almost sympathetic to another case of wine-lover exaggeration. In his popular book Inventing Wine, author Paul Lukacs claimed that for much of history wine was valued more for buzz than taste. “In fact, the descriptions of most ancient wines make them seem unattractive if not downright dreadful. To contemporary tastes, they probably would be virtually unpalatable,” wrote Lukacs, a professor of literature. He also believes that the wine lovers “that came of age following the Second World War had the opportunity to experience more particular flavors than ever before in history.”
The broad suggestion that all ancient wine would taste dreadful to us today rang hollow, as did the suggestion that an era that featured the uprooting of millions of acres of distinctive regional grape varieties somehow led to a broader range of flavors. Lukacs was making another plug for the superiority of modern French wine. To which I say: Egyptians built pyramids, and the Greeks pioneered math (Pythagoras), astronomy, philosophy, and literature. Yet they couldn’t make good wine? I asked McGovern for his take. “I agree with you that pre-1000 AD wine must have had its allurements, since why gush over some of it, age it, etc.?” he replied in an email.
I checked with Rick LaFleur, an emeritus professor of classics at the University of Georgia, who can actually read ancient texts in the original. LaFleur thought the blanket claim of bad ancient wine was wrong. “How can one be a wine snob from a two-thousand-year remove?” he told me. “The ancients loved wine; well, some just drank it, just as some of us just drink PBR; but others, the middle and upper classes, the intelligentsia, the gourmets, and the wine-snobs of their day, went crazy for certain varieties and vintages.”
So ancient wine varied, just like people, and just like modern wine. There was good wine, bad wine, cheap wine, expensive wine, ceremonial wine, medicinal wine, spiced wine, new wine, aged wine; in red, white, and rosé; from vineyards that flourished, died, and flourished again as time passed. Pagans, Christians, Jews, and even Muslims drank wine, sometimes secretly, sometimes not.
Thinking about Lukacs I felt a tinge of recognition. As the old saying goes, “There but for the grace of God go I.” He envisioned ancient wine one way; I looked at it from another perspective, one that was still essentially an educated guess. Both of us were influenced by memories, individual taste buds, and who knows what else.
Tastings
I believe Shivi Drori’s research will eventually lead to many new Holy Land wines made from local grapes. Recanati Winery is already making one, and Ido Lewinsohn is experimenting with others. Keep an eye on Yiftah Perets at Binyamina Winery, too.
Recanati Winery
Marawi (white, from Hamdani and Jandali grapes)
José Vouillamoz has done new research in Lebanon, too. He found that the local Obaideh grape has a unique genetic profile. Both Chateau Musar (www.chateaumusar.com) and Château St-Thomas (www.closstthomas.com) in the Bekaa Valley make Obaideh wines.