Cremisan
Therefore God give thee of the dew of heaven,
and the fatness of the earth, and plenty of corn and wine.
—Genesis 27:28 (KJV)
I was nervous walking around one of Jerusalem’s old neighborhoods on a clear, fresh April morning, but not because of anything around me. The shops were upscale, the restaurants had tempting menus, and the falafel and shawarma were tasty at the corner joint. The jitters came from the rapid approach of my vineyard reckoning. Seven years after tasting that Cremisan wine in the hotel room, I had a visit scheduled. My thoughts bounced between apprehension and excitement. Is it even possible to remember a taste from so long ago, or was my passion based on faulty memory? I pondered other scenarios. Maybe the wine used to be glorious, and now it was mediocre. Then again, it may have gotten better. Some Israeli newspaper stories explained that Cremisan had brought in a famous Italian winemaker to help.
Another question was bothering me, too: Could any of the old wine texts I was reading help me understand what I had tasted, and what the ancients drank? Or was it all seductively poetic speculation? A colleague suggested I talk to Aren Maeir. He is a renowned archaeologist who has led the dig at the Philistine city of Gath—reputedly the home of Goliath—for more than two decades. “Gath” can mean winepress in Hebrew, and the region was a major center for wine production in ancient times. Maeir’s team has found whole sets of wine-related vessels at the site, from large storage containers to delicate clay serving flasks with inscriptions. Just as the French take morning coffee, the Philistines sipped wine from bowls. In my correspondence with him, I noticed that Maeir ends his emails with a quote from philosopher Karl Popper that seemed appropriate for my wine investigations: “Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve.”
Maeir suggested meeting at a cafe on Emek Refaim Street, a trendy neighborhood not far from the Old City walls. He’s a slightly stocky man in his fifties, of average height, with very short graying hair and an easy sense of humor, which scientists sometimes lack. I asked if ancient texts are still relevant today. “Just in general, when you think about the ancient world, you have to realize that these people are exactly like us, save for that they don’t have the technology that we have,” Maeir said. “The same emotions, the same needs, the same everything.”
I mentioned the claim, which I had read in The Oxford Companion to Wine and elsewhere, that wine essentially vanished from the Holy Land after the Muslim conquest, except during the Crusades. He said there was no question winemaking continued, though on a smaller scale than before. “You had Christians and Jews living in the land. You can’t expect that things disappeared,” Maeir said. With a quick smile he added that the Bible forbids adultery and Prohibition banned alcohol. Did Christians stop sinning, or Americans stop drinking? Maeir told me that not all Muslims, particularly in the early centuries after the Arab conquest, abstained from wine. Under Islamic rule, Christians and Jews were also allowed to make, sell, and consume wine if they paid a special tax. In other words, not everyone observed all the rules about wine, or probably anything else.
Henry Maundrell, an English clergyman and Oxford University scholar, wrote a book titled A Journey from Aleppo to Jerusalem at Easter A.D. 1697 that perfectly captures the contradictions of life in the region at that time. He found one coastal tribe that changed its religion to match every business opportunity. “With Christians they profess themselves Christians; With Turks they are good Mussulmans; With Jews they pass for Jews . . . All that is certain concerning them is, that they make very much and good Wine, and are great Drinkers.” Maundrell also wrote of visiting a monastery in the region, observing, “It is a place of very mean Structure, and contains nothing in it extraordinary, but only the Wine made here, which is indeed most excellent.”
At the end of our conversation, I thanked Maeir for his time, and he offered to give me a tour of Gath on a future trip. Later I casually looked up Emek Refaim Street to see what it meant, and laughed. It’s named after the biblical Refaim Valley, reputedly home to a race of giants, and is where King David won battles over the Philistines. I had listened to an archaeologist tell Goliath stories at a cafe on Valley of Giants Street, and of course there were the parallels between the story of David and Cremisan, the tiny winery going up against far bigger competitors.
Next I visited Uri Mayer-Chissick, a historian of Jewish and Arabic food and culture. He lives with his wife and kids on a kibbutz, or communal farm, near the Sea of Galilee in northern Israel. He guides foraging tours, gives talks on healthy eating, and sells a selection of locally produced spices, oils, teas, and organic produce. He was stirring an enormous pot of chickpeas in a small kitchen when I arrived.
Jews, Christians, and Muslims share many of the same foods, Mayer-Chissick told me. His PhD thesis was on traditional medicine in the medieval Arab era, and wine production, too. He said the Oxford Companion was wrong to claim that winemaking vanished from the region for centuries. “[Muslims] still drank wine. The rich people drank wine, although it was forbidden,” he said. One Ottoman ruler was known as Selim the Sot for such habits, and records from the time of the Crusades up to the nineteenth century show that many Jews and Christians sold wine, though it was often made at home.
Mayer-Chissick read passages from his research to me. In 1384 a Christian source remarked, “In Gaza each person has his own wine.” In 1488 a Jewish source observed that “in Jerusalem people drink the living wine,” meaning it was less than one year old and wasn’t diluted with water. In 1818 a Jewish man visited the northern Israeli city of Safed, which dates to biblical times, and he described five kinds of wine, including some for the rich that was fifteen to twenty years old. A Christian pilgrim to Jerusalem in the seventeenth century found “a wine diluted with snow,” which had probably been brought over from the Lebanese mountains. Mayer-Chissick told me Jewish scholars discussed many aspects of buying, selling, and producing wine, saying, “If you buy wine from somebody, if it’s rotten or made to vinegar, who needs to pay? There are many stories about that. We know that they had a living wine—a wine that was very, very young—and a wine that was very old. There were three categories: new wine, the youngest; old wine, that’s between one and three years; and the oldest wine was three years and more.”
Mayer-Chissick doesn’t follow modern wine trends, but he had some general thoughts on why the Oxford Companion claimed wine vanished from the area after Mohammed’s victories in AD 636. Social and academic exchanges between Muslims and Jews or Christians in the region have dwindled in recent decades, he said, and few people pay attention to a more complex past. He said Jews and Christians were certainly discriminated against under Muslim rule, yet some were also trusted advisors or doctors to the ruling class. When the Crusaders invaded, Jews allied themselves with Muslims, fearing that Christian persecution would be even worse.
In the years after Mohammed and the rise of Islam, there’s no doubt that many of the vast Egyptian vineyards from earlier eras turned to producing table grapes, but winemaking never vanished. Despite all the war and persecution, a never-ending stream of both Jewish and Christian pilgrims kept returning to the Holy Land, and some stayed. An 1867 book by William Wyndham Malet specifically praised wine made near Cremisan. “There is red wine from Cyprus, but the Pilgrim prefers the white wine of Bethlehem, also on the table; this is a good ‘dry’ wine.”
I said good-bye to Mayer-Chissick and left feeling somewhat encouraged. Cremisan really could be using ancient, native Middle Eastern grapes.
The day arrived. I stood on a Jerusalem street corner with David Silverman. He is an excellent Israeli photographer and wine lover who covers the industry, and I thought his experience would help me gauge the Cremisan wines. Soon Amer Kardosh pulled up in a modest car. Kardosh is one of Cremisan’s regional distributors and he had driven from his home in Nazareth to give us the tour. He told us a little about himself as we drove. A friendly, energetic man in his late forties, he is part of the dwindling community of Middle Eastern Christians.
After escaping traffic we came to a narrow, curving road that followed a ridge between Jerusalem and Bethlehem, about three thousand feet above sea level. Terraces of olive trees stretched far down the mountain, like a twisted, rocky ladder. Groves of poplars, pines, and cedars covered the higher elevations, and the valley had a timeless feel, as if a hermit might casually emerge from a cave at any time. We stopped at a simple gate. “This is Cremisan,” Kardosh said, and I squeezed the seat and almost jumped out the door towards the limestone buildings. By one measure the trip from downtown Jerusalem took only fifteen minutes; by another it had taken years.
We walked past a four-story monastery building without seeing or hearing anyone. It was about a hundred feet long, and made of limestone blocks covered with sun-faded stucco. Classic arched windows and the size of the monastery suggested that it was designed to house dozens of monks. At the edge of the walkway a glorious panorama unfolded across the valley, stretching down five hundred feet or more. Vineyards first, then I counted two dozen lines of densely packed, curving rock terraces, each about a quarter-mile long, with scores of old olive trees on each level. They held miles of hand-laid stones. “Very, very, old terraces. No cement, just rocks,” Kardosh said. Cremisan’s side of the valley was one of the few undeveloped areas near Bethlehem or Jerusalem. On the other side, a mile away, new settlements and apartments clogged the hill. “So what was Cremisan’s wine like in the beginning?” I asked.
Kardosh said Cremisan was built by the Salesians, a Roman Catholic order founded in the mid-1800s to help poor children. Italian monks first came to the area in the 1860s and bought land, using the natural limestone caves around the ruins of a seventh-century church to store wine and other agricultural goods. The Salesians contributed money and people to build the monastery in 1881, and at first made sweet wine to celebrate the Mass. Then other churches and monasteries asked for that wine, and dry wine, too. “They started to sell it to other monasteries. Later it became a small factory.” The business grew to support an orphanage, a technical school, another monastery, an agricultural school, a kindergarten, and a bakery. “So all the money that we earn goes back to the community in different ways,” he said. The winery prospered in the 1980s and 1990s, selling to Christians, Jews, and some Muslims while rising to a peak production of more than six hundred thousand bottles per year. The Cremisan gift shop was often packed on Saturday mornings.
We followed a path towards the first terraces, past a small organic vegetable garden that helps feed the monks. Cremisan nuns run a school in a separate building, too. Turning a corner, an enormous, gnarled grapevine the size of a small tree sprawled up and out from its plot next to some stone buildings. “Look at this!” I said. It was about eight feet tall and two feet around at the base, with a canopy of twisted limbs extending out fifteen feet. Green leaves were just beginning to emerge.
“This is an old vine. Unbelievable. It’s still growing, still giving us grapes,” Kardosh said, adding that it is reputed to be more than one hundred years old.
We walked along the ridge road towards the main vineyard and passed a small grove of almond and plum trees. I asked whether the monks had brought grapes with them from Italy in the late 1800s, or if they used the local grapes. “For sure both,” Kardosh replied. But for decades Cremisan did not focus on the local varieties, using them only to blend with wine made from European grapes.
Trying to avoid sounding rude, I asked the question that had puzzled me since tasting Cremisan in the Amman hotel room—why do so few people know about their wines? Kardosh sighed. The Salesians ran it in an almost otherworldly fashion. For decades they didn’t export or do much marketing to anyone beyond Christians in Israel, the Palestinian Territories, and nearby Jordan, which has a large Palestinian population. Time was an issue, too. “Here, to do something, you need . . . years,” Kardosh said, since the monks painstakingly debate every issue. He added that helping orphans is the most important mission for Salesians, and then explained his own ties to Cremisan—his father was an orphan who grew up to become one of Cremisan’s wine distributors. Kardosh took over that position in 2001, after his father died, even though his degree is in electronics. “I’ve known them thirty, forty years,” he said of the monks.
I realized my romantic vision of Cremisan’s vineyards had missed a crucial point. I obsessed about how the wine tasted, exactly what grapes they were using, and how those grapes related to the history of wine. Perfectly normal questions from a twenty-first-century wine nerd. But Cremisan had other priorities. They made wine as a part of rituals that go back to the earliest days of Christianity. To devout Christians (and Jews), grapes are one of God’s gifts to men and women, and can be symbols of ecstasy, temptation, and loss. The Bible mentions wine, grapes, or vines hundreds of times, such as this poignant passage in Isaiah called “The Song of the Vineyard.”
My loved one had a vineyard
on a fertile hillside.
He dug it up and cleared it of stones
and planted it with the choicest vines.
He built a watchtower in it
and cut out a winepress as well.
Then he looked for a crop of good grapes,
but it yielded only bad fruit. [. . .]
When I looked for good grapes,
why did it yield only bad?
There’s also this famously dark vision of retribution and redemption from Revelation, which inspired “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” and Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath: “So the angel thrust his sickle into the earth and gathered the vine of the earth, and threw it into the great winepress of the wrath of God. And the winepress was trampled outside the city, and blood came out of the winepress, up to the horses’ bridles, for one thousand six hundred furlongs.”
The monks didn’t care what wine critics or magazines thought. The vineyards and olive groves helped the poor and provided wine to celebrate the Mass. They didn’t need to do PR. Why would a score from a critic matter on Judgment Day?
The second Palestinian Intifada, or uprising, was taking place when Kardosh started working as the distributor. “When there is [an] uprising, everything is stopped totally,” he said. Cremisan had trouble transporting wine, and people who had been visiting the monastery gift shop for decades no longer came. Israeli authorities started building a security barrier in the area, and the dispute continues over how it cuts through Cremisan lands. The case has gone all the way to Israel’s Supreme Court. Kardosh said that if the wall is fully built, Cremisan workers who now have a five-minute walk from a nearby village will have a much longer commute by car, creating numerous problems.
On top of everything else Cremisan has had to juggle the religious, cultural, and legal sensitivities of suppliers and customers. The word Byzantine originated in this part of the world, and such entanglements persisted long after that empire fell. Some of Cremisan’s buildings are technically inside Jerusalem’s district—and under Israeli control—and others are in the Palestinian West Bank. Most of the grapes for the wine come from Palestinian areas, but some vineyards are in Israel. That created a bureaucratic dilemma over how to label the wine for export. Some European nations are attracted to the wine’s Judeo-Christian links, but in Japan it’s marketed as a Palestinian product. Other places forbid using the word Palestine, since technically there isn’t such a state. One rabbi who liked the wine suggested they would sell far more if it were labeled kosher; Cremisan politely demurred, since under kosher laws the monks wouldn’t be allowed to touch the winemaking tanks.
As outside pressures mounted, so did inward ones. By 2005 the winery was faltering. Sales had fallen by more than 50 percent. Some vintages met the established quality standards; others didn’t. To survive Cremisan needed to change, and seek new markets. That led to a partnership with Italian wine consultant Riccardo Cotarella and Civielle, an organic vineyard cooperative located between Venice and Milan. The Italians began to help Cremisan understand and appreciate what an extraordinary resource they had in the local grapes. “We had used the grapes before but we didn’t understand their significance,” Kardosh said.
Several grape varieties were sent to Italy for DNA analysis, including Dabouki, Baladi, Hamdani, and Jandali. The tests found a genealogy different from any well-known Western grapes, though perhaps related to some in Spain. That mix could be because seafaring people carried Middle Eastern vines across the Mediterranean thousands of years ago. The vines bred with local varieties, leaving traces of their DNA. “We have something here. We have grapes that nobody has,” Kardosh told me. The monks made a renewed commitment to the winery and to supporting the many families that have worked in the vineyards for generations.
Kardosh, Silverman, and I continued walking down the ridge road, past vineyards on our right, a soccer field and basketball court for local youth on the left, and more groves of cedars and poplars on either side. Kardosh smiled. This was a secret place for lovers to come and talk, away from family and friends, he said. We came to a hundred-yard-long terrace of Baladi vines. The first green leaves were just bursting out, and Kardosh introduced me to one of Cremisan’s employees, forty-year-old Baha Darras. Everyone in Darras’s family—including his father, grandfather, and grandmother—had worked in the vineyards at times, but none drank wine since they’re Muslims, he said. Another longtime Muslim worker told me he can judge the quality of a vintage by color and smell. “We have Christians and Muslims working together,” Kardosh told us proudly.
Workers were hand-weeding the vineyard. Ladybugs crawled along the leaves. They’re a natural version of pest control since they eat aphids. I pointed to the bugs but Kardosh didn’t understand the name I used. Here everyone calls them Moses bugs, or Moses’s cow. The venerable Jewish–American newspaper the Forward untangled the linguistic trail, noting that the “Lady” part of our term refers to the Virgin Mary in many European languages. In French the bugs are sometimes called la vache de la Vierge (“the cow of the Virgin”), while the German is Marienkäfer (“Mary’s beetle”). The Forward suggested that Jews were more comfortable naming the humble bug after Moses.
We walked a little farther and arrived at the winery. It had moved from the monastery basement as business expanded in the 1970s. The new building is perched on the edge of the ridge, next to a vineyard, with old cast-iron wine-pressing machines casually displayed in various spots. We went inside to an enormous room with twenty-foot ceilings. The Italians had donated a new bottling machine, but a large nineteenth-century copper brandy still sat in one corner, too. Stone arches framed the entrance to the fermentation room, which had old cement-lined vats sitting next to stainless steel ones. Dozens of five-foot-tall oak barrels were packed under limestone arches lining one wall, next to some less than half that size.
Kardosh introduced us to Laith Kokaly, Cremisan’s new twenty-nine-year-old winemaker, and I realized for the first time that monks no longer make the wine. In recent years there were fewer and fewer young candidates to replace those who got sick or died, and Cremisan now had only seven active monks. Kokaly, a Palestinian Christian from the nearby community of Beit Jala, studied winemaking in Italy for three years. Cremisan paid for the training. Kokaly told me his grandfather made wine from local grapes many years ago, and Kardosh nodded. In the past almost every Christian family in the area made their own wine. Kokaly poured us some of the newest Dabouki white wine, a 2014. Crisp and slightly sweet, it had hints of citrus and caramel.
“I love the aroma,” Silverman said, and we both thought it was a refreshing, summertime type of wine. Next we tried Cremisan’s blend of Hamdani and Jandali white grapes, which was crisp but minerally, and with far more depth and flavor than the Dabouki. It was a lovely, balanced wine, one that Silverman thought was different from the typical white wines being made in Israel, which were using European grapes.
Kokaly told me that with Cotarella’s help Cremisan improved all aspects of the winemaking, from the vineyards to fermentation and aging. The response to the wines made with native grapes was positive enough that Cremisan stopped using many European varieties. “Enough. Enough of Chardonnay,” Kardosh said. I loved the Cremisan whites, but could hardly wait to taste the red wine that had captivated me years ago. Kokaly poured us some new 2014 Baladi from tanks, and Silverman and I sniffed and tasted.
I was almost speechless. The red was a decent dry wine, but unremarkable, with none of the spiciness and depth that had first attracted me. I felt a little unsteady, and it wasn’t just the alcohol. My memories had crashed into reality. We tried some of the bottled Baladi. I had the same reaction. It was an OK wine, but not the kind anyone obsesses about for years.
I asked a few more questions about the 2008 reds, but didn’t push because of a fundamental problem: Kokaly wasn’t that winemaker. Cremisan was focused on the future, not the past. In retrospect I had missed a warning sign. When the sommelier for the restaurant Ottolenghi praised Cremisan on the Wine Grapes website, it was for the white wine. Gal Zohar had called the Hamdani-Jandali blend “crisp, fresh and with a nice complexity to it . . . very original and dangerously drinkable, too.” He didn’t mention Cremisan’s red.
We walked back to the old monastery and stopped at the gift shop, but it was locked. Someone went looking for the key. I saw a narrow garden path near the gate and headed down it, more out of idle curiosity than anything else. At the end was an old hand-powered cast-iron winepress—I guessed from the early 1900s—and in a little clearing to the left, under some tall poplars, were ancient limestone grape- and olive-pressing troughs, stone rollers, and wine-pressing troughs, hundreds or perhaps thousands of years old. I sat in the garden, dumbfounded. A French winery would die for such a museum exhibit; this one didn’t even have plaques or any explanations.
I thought of something Aren Maeir had said. Whether you think the Bible and Torah are about specific men and women who once lived or not, there is no question that those books were written by real people who walked through valleys just like the one I was looking out over, and who drank wine in these very hills thousands of years ago. I was looking at some of the evidence.
I stayed in the garden for a few minutes, daydreaming of the people who used those stone tools, then headed back to the gate. The gift shop key was found and I bought some wine and locally produced almonds. When I asked Kardosh about the garden exhibit, he casually told me that all of it had been found on the Cremisan property, or in the case of the cast-iron press, used by the monks in the past. But no one knew much about the exact dates of the artifacts. They had too much else to worry about.
I left Cremisan exhilarated, puzzled, and feeling like I was missing something. The wine I drank in 2008 remained a mystery. It was probably made in 2006—just before the Italian consultants got involved, so I’d tasted one of the last vintages made by the monks. Now that bottle seemed as unreachable as wine made two thousand years ago. No one knew exactly what was in it.
I thanked Kardosh for the tour, said good-bye to Silverman, and put the Cremisan questions on hold, wondering what my next meeting with an Israeli scientist would reveal. I was in for more surprises.
Tastings
Listed below are some of Cremisan’s wines available in the United States. The wines are produced organically, without pesticides. All are about twenty dollars. These are fresh vintages meant to be drunk right away. It’s not clear yet how they age.
Star of Bethlehem Hamdani & Jandali blend (white)
Star of Bethlehem Dabouki (white)
Star of Bethlehem Baladi (red)
67 Wines & Spirits sells them at their Manhattan store located at 179 Columbus Ave., New York, NY, 10023, and online at www.67wine.com.
Many Israeli and Middle Eastern restaurants on the East Coast sell Cremisan wines, too, such as Tanoreen, a wonderful restaurant in Brooklyn.
In addition to red and white wines, Cremisan makes a brandy and an altar wine that are available in parts of the Middle East. See terrasanctatrading.com for more details.