A Mysterious Wine
The Wine of Life keeps oozing drop by drop,
The Leaves of Life keep falling one by one.
—Omar Khayyam, The Rubayiat, ca. 1100
Alone in Amman, Jordan, I looked at the mini-bar skeptically yet wistfully. Finding good wine in a hotel room is a tantalizing concept, but I had a rule: never buy the stuff. This place had rustic tiles and carved wooden doors in the lobby that gave way to generic rooms—clean and fairly comfortable, but like a Holiday Inn, without character. I was fidgety. Watching Arabic TV without understanding a word was only briefly entertaining. The evening call to prayers from a nearby mosque reminded me of the limited alcohol options, and I knew hardly anyone in the city. I went over to the TV cabinet, opened the door again, and sadly contemplated the row of bottles next to the little refrigerator. One red wine had an unusual label with old-fashioned type and images. It read:
Produced and Bottled by Cremisan Cellars
HOLY LAND—Bethlehem
That seemed odd. It was the spring of 2008, and there were still vineyards in Bethlehem? My hazy Catholic childhood taught me that people drank wine there in biblical times, but I’d never seen Cremisan on a store shelf or restaurant list, or in a review. The label said they started making wine in 1885, which I found interesting but also curious. Had no critics checked it out? The winery is just a few miles from Jerusalem.
The bottle was the only thought-provoking thing in the room and I was tired, physically and emotionally, from a Middle East reporting assignment. With low expectations I broke my rule, pulled the cork, and took a sip. Wow. I perked up immediately. The dry red wine had a spicy flavor, sort of Syrah-ish, but not quite. It was drinkable, balanced, and pleasingly different, with even a hint of earthy terroir. I went to bed happier, imagining it might be fun to visit Cremisan.
But deadlines beckoned for the rest of the trip. I returned to the United States planning to buy another bottle at home to share with friends. No luck. Visits to wine stores drew blank stares. Cremisan didn’t have an American importer, so I couldn’t even buy the wine online. When I told the story, some suggested that I airfreight a few bottles. They didn’t get the torturous nature of international wine shipping laws. Bethlehem is technically in the Palestinian Territories, and that didn’t help either, especially after the Second Intifada, or uprising. I tried emailing the winery but got no response.
There was something else, too. I was getting bored with the Chardonnays, Merlots, Cabernet Sauvignons, and Rieslings in every wine store and on every restaurant list. I’m not against those grapes—of course they make some wonderful wines. But why the lack of diversity? Wasn’t there more?
Little details about Cremisan kept me intrigued. Once, when I looked for news of my wine-madeleine, I found Cremisan’s rudimentary website. The winemaker was an Italian monk, and the monastery was built near the ruins of a seventh century Byzantine church. They made some Merlot, but also used local grapes I’d never heard of: red Baladi, white Jandali, and Hamdani. Had they really grown in this region for thousands of years? Did Cremisan use native grapes to make wine that the Egyptians, biblical prophets, and Romans might have drunk?
The buying difficulty was perplexing. Why wouldn’t a nice, modestly priced wine from a vineyard in the heart of the Holy Land have at least a small built-in market? Perhaps the monks were indifferent to worldly marketing. Whoever heard of monks in the Middle East making wine in the twenty-first century, anyway?
The website showed various labels with a jumble of multicultural wine references: Côtes de Cremisan, Old Hock, David’s Tower, Cana of Galilee, and Blanc de Blanc, “made from selected Daboky local white grapes grown in the mountains of Bethlehem.” I listed influences and came up with Italian–French–Christian–Jewish–Arabic–British–German–Spanish. In a region so fractured by ethnic and religious wars, this melting pot was sort of endearing.
The memory of my hotel room wine lingered like the refrain of an old pop song. In 2011 I moved on to a busy job as a correspondent for the Associated Press, and soon afterwards I looked for Cremisan or their mysterious grapes in the third edition of the authoritative Oxford Companion to Wine, which was the current one at the time. Nothing. The entry on Israel said vineyards there were destroyed after the spread of Islam in AD 636, and that “the Crusaders temporarily restored wine production between AD 1100 and 1300, but with the exile of the Jews, vine-growing ceased.” Supposedly no real wine industry existed until Baron Edmond de Rothschild started a winery in the 1880s. Even worse, it said Israel currently had “no indigenous varieties” of grapes.
But another entry on a nearby page of the Oxford Companion [under Islam] said that in the Middle Ages “Muslim conquest by no means outlawed wine production” and that Arabs even tried finer wines made in the Christian monasteries of Iraq. Abu Nuwas, who lived in Baghdad around AD 800, was famous for his scandalous poems about drinking, with lines such as “[P]our me a glass of wine, and confirm that it’s wine! / Do not do it in secret, when it can be done in the open.”
I was confused. Wine’s supposed disappearance from the Holy Land seemed to be one of those lazy cultural stereotypes that appears to make perfect sense, until you realize it doesn’t. That region had significant Christian and Jewish communities from the seventh to twentieth centuries, under many different rulers. Islam’s wine prohibition didn’t apply to them. How could winemaking and vineyards have vanished?
But I didn’t really have the time to explore Middle Eastern wine history. Tracking down bottles from Cremisan fell to the bottom of my to-do lists. I’d stumbled on an unusual wine, nothing more. From time to time, though, whenever I read a little pocket-sized book of Persian poetry I was fond of, I’d be reminded of possible holes in the Oxford Companion narrative. In the 1300s Hafiz wrote: Now that I have raised the glass of pure wine to my lips / The nightingale starts to sing! And this by Rumi, in the 1200s: That jug full of wine has brought me to such a state that I have broken so many jars today.
Sometimes the Muslim wine poets spoke metaphorically about alcohol, but to me the vivid lines also suggest real-life experience. Medieval Jewish wine poets who had lived in what is now Israel wrote about wine, too.
When your heart is cradled in sorrow
and trouble today and tomorrow,
day after day,
drink the liquid of the grape, my friend
—Israel ben Moses Najara (ca. 1555–1625)
Persians, Arabs, and Jews, all reciting wine poems through the centuries when vineyards supposedly disappeared because of Islam? But poems aren’t historical proof, and who was I to question The Oxford Companion to Wine, anyway? I could even see why the modern wine trade ignored such history, and Cremisan. As I pored over wine poems Chinese billionaires bought up Bordeaux vineyards, and California’s Napa Valley boom continued, helped by surging tech fortunes and eager consumers. Single bottles from Burgundy’s Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, one of the world’s most famous wineries, auctioned for more than ten thousand dollars. Cremisan was a viticultural David up against Goliaths. Why care about the history of obscure Middle Eastern grapes when there is so much money sloshing around the wine world?
Memories of the hotel room bottle faded. I gave up looking for Cremisan wine. Until I heard about José Vouillamoz’s work. He co-authored the landmark 2012 book Wine Grapes with Jancis Robinson and Julia Harding, and it raised my hopes. The authors described 1,368 varieties of grapes used to make wine all over the world, explored the history of each one, and included diagrams of wine grape family trees based on DNA research. The book won a James Beard Award plus many other international honors. It’s an encyclopedia of famous varieties, plus rare ones on the verge of extinction. The book enthralled me, and exposed the extent of my wine ignorance. I eagerly typed “Cremisan” into the Wine Grapes ebook search box, along with the names of their unusual grapes.
Nothing.
I contacted Vouillamoz, hoping for some shred of encouragement. “I must confess something almost embarrassing. We missed them. The grapes they are growing are not in our book because at that time we had never heard of them—neither me nor Jancis Robinson. So it shows you how obscure they were, at least a few years ago,” he told me. Robinson is one of the most famous, knowledgeable, and respected critics in the world. I was infatuated with a winery she’d never heard of. Maybe I’d found an arcane wine history error about who drank what when in the Oxford Companion. So what? It was all feeling like some wild grape chase, trying to link Cremisan to a perhaps mystical ancient wine.
But Wine Grapes led to a different realization: I wanted to learn about wine, not be preached at. I was tired of excessively florid reviews with laundry lists of all the flavors and aromas in a glass, and skeptical of critics who claimed the ability to distinguish between 92-, 95-, or 100-point bottles. Now I saw the obvious: wine grape DNA can be analyzed the way a home cheek-swab kit delivers data about your family tree. Evolution leaves a trail, whether it’s Neanderthals splitting from Homo sapiens or the birth of a new grape variety. My hotel room wine morphed from an obsession into training wheels. I understood that obscure grapes weren’t just quirkily interesting—each had a special flavor profile. Losing one could mean losing certain tastes forever.
Vouillamoz’s genetic detective work inspired all sorts of questions: Where did wine grapes originate? I didn’t even know how to define “ancient” grape varieties—did it mean five hundred years old, or five thousand? And why do grapes express so many flavors and aromas, when rice and grains, also used to make alcohol, don’t? I had no idea.
Wine Grapes also suggested the beginnings of a movement: vineyards all over the world determined to preserve native grapes. I made lists of the curious wines from Armenia, Greece, France, and many other countries, wanting to try them all: Assyrtiko, Chinuri, Kisi, Maratheftiko, Nero d’Avola, Saperavi, Tannat, Violento, Xynisteri—the vineyard equivalents of Slow Food, multicolored heirloom vegetables, or craft whiskey. For the first time I understood that endless vineyards of Cabernet, Chardonnay, and Merlot had pushed aside hundreds of local varieties over the last century.
Other connections emerged. The modern wine industry looked more and more like a dressed-up version of industrial agriculture, designed to produce maximum yields at the lowest cost. That reminded me of Michael Pollan’s observation about apples in The Botany of Desire: “[T]he industry got together and decided it would be wise to simplify that market by planting and promoting only a small handful of brand-name varieties.” Thomas Jefferson loved Esopus Spitzenburg apples, and early Americans enjoyed dozens more: Newtown Pippins, Roxbury Russets, and Ashmead’s Kernels. But in the twentieth century Red Delicious, Golden Delicious, Granny Smith, and McIntosh took over in much the same way a few French grapes took over the world’s vineyards. It’s not just apples and wine. Take bananas. One called Cavendish occupies 90 percent of the world market, even though there are about a thousand banana varieties in the world. Flowers? I knew from Amy Stewart’s Flower Confidential that most popular varieties have almost no scent, because the industry cares more about size, color, and the ability to travel.
Corporate winemaking even helped limit some wines made from the famous grapes. The Atlantic published the article “The Dark Side of Wine” by wildly influential wine critic Robert M. Parker Jr. in 2000. In it he opined: “[I]t seems to be the tragedy of modern winemaking that it is now increasingly difficult to tell an Italian Chardonnay from one made in France or California or Australia. When the corporate winemakers of the world begin to make wines all in the same way, designing them to offend the least number of people, wine will no doubt lose its fascinating appeal and individualism to become no better than most brands of whiskey, gin, scotch, or vodka.”
Statistics show there is cause to worry. A study in the Journal of Wine Economics found that between 1990 and 2010 Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot more than doubled their share in the world’s vineyards. By 2010 French grape varieties comprised 67 percent of vineyard acreage in New World countries, up from 53 percent just ten years before. Wine is supposedly all about variety, but it’s easier and cheaper to limit the range of tastes and flavors we experience. At their best, the leading French grapes produce luscious, beautifully complex wine, but that’s alongside a tidal wave of industrial, filtered, so-so product. In 2014 the Bordeaux region alone produced about seven hundred million bottles.
All this new information was overwhelming, and it raised questions for me. Wine Grapes illuminated the loss of wine grape diversity and the efforts to preserve rare varieties, but it was a work in progress. The big, foldout genealogy charts focused on Europe. There were gaps in the Caucasus Mountains and the Middle East, regions that were making wine thousands of years before the French or Italians. That seemed akin to using Columbus as the starting point for North American history.
Yet Wine Grapes did a superb job of showing how many European grapes share a few common ancestors. A once scorned grape called Gouais Blanc is related to more than eighty different varieties, including Riesling, one of the world’s most popular grapes. The point? Even if you don’t care about rare grapes, we wouldn’t be drinking many wines without them.
So I was back to wondering: Were the varieties Cremisan used part of an earlier, forgotten network of “founder grapes”? The DNA of some undiscovered vine should have the answer, in theory. Perhaps I could seek out rare, native grapes with unusual tastes and try to understand the origins of wine at the same time. A scientific puzzle with wine tasting? Count me in.
One day I visited the Wine Grapes website and saw a note. The authors explained that they had missed some grape varieties and asked for suggestions, promising to include the first ten winners in future editions of the book. There they were: Cremisan’s grapes. Gal Zohar, the sommelier for the world-famous London restaurant Ottolenghi, won for submitting the Baladi, Jandali, Dabouki, and Hamdani grapes. After five years of futile scrounging for information, I no longer felt so alone. Someone else liked the Cremisan wine, too.