Imagine making wine on the same hills that your ancestors did 2,000 years ago. Yaakov Berg has this experience every day.
The CEO of Psagot Winery, Berg lives in Israel’s Judean Hills, producing award-winning wine alongside his wife and three children. His business, launched 13 years ago with 3,000 bottles, now produces 300,000 and has become Israel’s largest exporter of wine.
The Jewish Press: You age some of your wines in a 2,000-year-old cave. How did you discover the cave?
Berg: When we started to think about opening a winery, we built a small road in our vineyard and found a hole filled with mud. We spent two or three months digging it out with spoons and buckets and discovered a cave from the days of the Second Temple with an ancient winepress.
In the cave we also found a coin that appears on all our wine bottles. It was made during the great revolution against the Romans in 67 CE. On one side of the coin is an ancient vessel for storing wine and the words “For the freedom of Zion.” And on the other side is a wine leaf and the words “Year Two” – of the revolution against the Romans.
It’s unbelievable, if you think about it: After 2,000 years – in 1967 – we came back to the land where our winery is located and found this coin with the date 67. For people who are not Jewish or don’t know a lot about Judaism, this coin really connects them to the land.
You make wine today in the same spot that Jews did during the Second Temple period.
Yes, exactly. And more than that. When we started the winery, we hired experts from abroad, and all of them said, “Yaakov, you’re wasting your time. Nothing will grow here. It’s a desert. Nothing has grown here for 2,000 years.” Mark Twain visited Israel 130 years ago and wrote the same thing – that the land is a desert. But when we, the Jewish people, came back to our homeland, the land came back to us – as God promised it would. And we see this in our vineyard every day. It’s unbelievable.
We get medals every year in the best wine competitions all over the world. We send our wines, for example, to a very big competition, “Vinalies,” in Paris, and every year we get gold medals. Many people say we win because it’s a blind competition so they don’t know beforehand which wine they’re tasting. Maybe if they knew it was Israeli wine they wouldn’t give us medals. But the quality is there. It’s unbelievable.
How would you compare Israel’s wine industry to those of other countries – France, for example?
It’s growing very fast. People now recognize that Israeli wines are very good. Everybody’s talking about it. And we came from a very problematic place because 30-40 years ago, Jewish wine was known as the worst that existed – and that was because of the kiddush wine Jews made in the exile when they were forbidden to grow grapes.
Everybody forgot that Israel is the best wine country. In the ancient world, the Romans [imported] their best wine from Israel – not Italy or France. So we need to explain to people that Israeli wine is not kiddush wine. It’s high-end wine. And I know many people today who actually prefer Israeli wine to French or Italian wine because our wines are more fruity, more strong, more deep, than European wine.
When did Israel’s wine industry start?
About 130 years ago. The person who started the wine industry in Israel was the famous Baron Edmond de Rothschild. He owned the best winery in the world; it’s called Mouton Rothschild in France. It’s the most expensive wine that exists. So he came from the wine business and, because he was a very good Jew, he invested ten times more in his winery in Israel than he invested in his winery in France.
But he didn’t succeed. People had no money, so it was very difficult for him to sell good wine. Also a very serious disease caused almost all of his vines to die. So this is one of the reasons that Israel didn’t make good wine until, I would say, ten to twenty years ago.
In 2105 the European Union issued a new regulation requiring all imported products from the West Bank to be labeled as such. Does this rule affect you? Is it still in force?
Yes, very much so. But we’re fighting it.
Everybody understands that this is not about Yehuda v’Shomron. It’s about Israel’s enemies trying to destroy her. They know they can’t beat Israel in the battlefield, so they say, “Let’s harm its economy.” So what we tell our friends is, “We are not going to convince them, but if we show – in numbers – that because of the BDS movement, Yehuda v’Shomron is selling more, I promise you that in a year from now they will stop.”
And we’ve already succeeded. In the United States last year we doubled our sales. And I believe it’s because people said, “We’re not going to let this happen.”
Your winery is right next to Ramallah, which is not exactly a hotbed of Zionism. What is it like running a winery so close to this city?
We have no problem. We’re very happy where we’re located. I’m telling you, I travel all over the world and I don’t see a better place to live.
Isn’t it dangerous?
Not at all. A senator from Illinois recently visited the winery and said the same thing, “Yaakov, aren’t you worried? It’s dangerous here.” So I asked him, “Senator, where are you from?” He said, “Chicago.” I said, “Senator, can you tell me, please, how many people got murdered in Chicago last year?” If I’m not mistaken, it was more than seven hundred people. So I said to him, “Do you know how many people were murdered in all of Israel? Fewer than one hundred. So where is it more dangerous – to walk in Chicago or to walk on my land here in Israel?”
It’s not like what you hear and see in the media. The media have an agenda, so they tell people it’s dangerous…. I don’t lock my car, I never lock my house. My kids walk around every day. That is the atmosphere of my life.
At the conclusion of his performances, Jackie Mason used to joke that non-Jews ask each other, “Want to drink?” while Jews ask each other, “Want to eat?” How do you respond to the stereotype that Jews don’t drink?
If you go back to our sources – the Torah, the Gemara – you’ll see that wine is everywhere. Israel was known as the best wine country in the ancient world. The meraglim brought grapes because Israel was known for its wine. On Shabbat and chagim we drink wine. And which other nation gives wine to a baby on its eighth day? Only the Jewish people.
The problem is the exile. One of the terrible things that happened to the Jewish people in exile is that it was forbidden for Jews to own land. And because they couldn’t own land, they couldn’t grow grapes. So they were forced to make mevushal wine for kiddush, which is called wine but is so low-end that it’s not really wine. That’s actually the whole idea of mevushal wine – that you can call it wine but don’t have to worry if a non-Jew touches it since he won’t use it for avodah zarah.
So for 2,000 years Jewish people drank very bad wine. But that wasn’t always the case. And now that we have come back to our homeland, part of the magic of our return is the fact that in Israel today you can find very high-end wine again. The industry has returned.