“Please, come in,” I said. Two Hassidim in long black coats and round, black felt hats walked in and sat down, looking shy. Behind them came Tuvya, a wine crony of mine from the grape purchase co-op, in a white shirt showing some purple splashes. He had a big, pleased grin on his face.

He said, “How’re ya doing?” and extracted a bottle of wine from a backpack. “Brought some Merlot from two years ago.”

Tuvya and I get together about twice a year: once at the grape crush, and then once again sometime later at his house or mine. We compare our wines from the previous year and talk shop. He’s unusually relaxed about socializing with me, a woman not his wife. Partly because he knew my parents – we also have friends in common – but partly, I think, because my interest in homebrewing  sort of makes me one of the guys. I had entered the co-op on his introduction.

“Great, welcome to the new apartment,” I said. “I’ll bring a corkscrew and some glasses.”

The two others were Yechezkiel, an American baal-teshuva of many year’s standing, and his son Brumy (Avraham). They came to return the grape press they’d borrowed earlier – again, through Tuvya. Because of moving house, I didn’t make wine this year so my equipment was free.

I could tell the father and son felt uncomfortable in my house, which must not look at all like the homes they’re used to. They didn’t remove their big black hats and sat at a modest distance. Although well-mannered and pleasant, they didn’t  address me directly at first. They talked  to Tuvya instead. That was fine. Everyone has a set of mores to live by, and I don’t judge. I thought it quite forthcoming of them to bring the press back themselves.

Maybe a glass of this good Merlot  will put them a bit more at ease, I thought (it was fruity, with mellow oaky tannins, just soft enough).

I have to admit, I do get a kick out of being the only woman in this group. At the crush, some of the men don’t know what to make of me. Religious women don’t drink wine, right? Much less make it. Most, though, are just busy getting the work done. Weighing out the grapes, loading them into the crusher, sealing the big plastic barrels full of crushed grapes and juice. I’m the one that brings the scales, the hydrometer to measure the alcohol, the sanitizing materials.  The guys provide the muscle and call me “Rebbetzin.”

Two years ago at the crush, Yechezkiel and I had chatted briefly about making soap, his eyes never meeting mine out of modesty. It turns out that he buys a ton of olives every year and gets them crushed for oil. That intrigued me. I love olive oil. We discussed, not very seriously, making soap from his excess oil, then forgot about it in the business of the grape crush. Now he and his son were drinking wine at my table, talking about olives and olive oil.

“I’m not optimistic about the quality of the olives this year,” Yechezkiel said. “We’ve had early rainfall, and that’s not so good. The olives fill up with water instead of oil.”

“Same problem with grapes,” I said. “But there’s a kibbutz in the Negev that irrigates their olive groves with salt water, and their olive oil is delicious.

“I love the olive tree,” I went on, risking becoming personal. “Everything about the olive is noble. The tree itself is beautiful, the wood hard and good for carving, the leaves are medicinal, and the fruit makes the best oil.”

Behind their round glasses, Yechezkiel’s eyes lit up with understanding. “I’m planting a small grove on my property,” he said. “To please my wife, I’ve already put in lemons, figs, and pomegranates – a small grapevine too – but I really want to grow at least a quarter of a ton of olives.”

“Where do you crush your olives?”

“I buy them at a moshav up north and get them crushed there in a modern mill. I’m looking for somewhere else to crush them, though. I want it done the old-fashioned way, between two mill-stones. That way I can see everything that’s going on, and I can be 100% sure that the oil will be kosher all year round and for Passover.”

We have something in common, I thought. I’m another who loves to handle raw materials, make everything from the most basic scratch. Possibly because I find ancient, historical methods romantic. But that’s not a word I would use to this black-clad man with his distinction and his air of having just stepped out of the yeshivah.

Brumy, who had remained silent till now, gently said, “A drop of wine is rolling down the bottle – it’ll stain your white tablecloth.”

“This boy has a good mother,” I said, wiping the bottle, and everyone chuckled.

The magic of wine and of olives! The strangers had become, in a strange way, friends.

The Anjou pears of The Colors of November were pretty, but rather dry and not very sweet. Looking around the kitchen, I saw a bottle of summer fruit wine that was half-full. To use everything up, I made a wine syrup and made Poires au Vin, and everyone was glad I did.

Pears in Wine

6 servings

Ingredients:

Ingredients:

6 large, firm pears

3 cups dry or semi-dry wine

1 1/2 cup white sugar

1 stick of cinnamon

Method:

Choose a pan into which the pears will fit with a little room to spare. In it, pour the wine and the sugar. Add the cinnamon. Simmer the wine and sugar for 10 minutes, uncovered.

Meanwhile, peel the pears, leaving the stem on. It just looks pretty that way.

Gently place the pears in the wine syrup. Cover the pot and tilt the lid to let the steam escape. Cook the pears over a low fire for 30 minutes or till tender, turning them over 15 minutes into the cooking so that they absorb the syrup all over and come out colored evenly. If you use a red wine, they will be almost burgundy.

Chill the pears and serve each one in a small bowl with some of the syrup.

Even small children like this simple fruit dessert.

I’m pleased to see that wine is now being made in Downtown, USA. This article from the NY Times online reports the appearance of local wines made in big cities, just a bus ride away from the consumer.

Readers of this blog know that I make my own wine at home. I buy the grapes in a co-op purchase;

watch them go through a crusher set up in someone’s parking lot or backyard;

and take them home to my apartment. The other co-op winemakers do the same. I wrote a poem about it a while ago. Of course, my family has to tolerate two big barrels in the living room for several days.

Then there’s a holy mess in the kitchen when I press the juice out of the grapes.

And there are the carboys, taking up space around the house but providing a conversation starter when receiving guests (“And how’s the wine coming along?”).

I love traveling to visit wineries, as a recent post shows. But most are only accessible by car, which means planning a few hours to get there, do a little tour, taste some wine, choose a bottle or 6, and take it home. I easily admit that my home-made wine doesn’t nearly reach the excellence of professionally-made wine, but it’s still pretty good, and worth the effort to make. I also love to know that other people here are making wine at home.

Now if only there were more urban wineries in Israel…I hear there’s a good one in Ramat HaChayal…

Towards the end of Sukkot, Baroness Tapuzina asked me if I’d like to drive out with her and Mr. Baroness T. There was a regional wine festival promoting the wineries of the Judean Hills, and they proposed to travel and taste. Drive through those cool, hilly roads and go tasting from winery to winery? Sure I wanted to go. We thought it would be fun to blog the event in our separate ways, so be sure to click the link above and see the event from the Baroness’s viewpoint.

The Baroness drove, and Mr. Baroness, holding the map, directed. They bickered gently up front, and I lolled happily around in the back seat. So good to get away from the round of shopping, cooking, and washing up that consume the holidays when Yom Tov falls in the middle of the week. Never mind all that – our picnic lunches were carefully packed, the day was sunny and mild, and we were in a mood of pleasant anticipation.

At first we talked about the things that fill our heads and keep us compelled all day – work, colleagues, travel, politics, the economy. The cities and highways fell behind. Soon we were driving through higher country, traveling on roads that ran among vineyards and plowed fields. The talk fell into an easier, relaxed mode. We retold old stories, argued about this and that, touched on the ever-absorbing topic of food, got lost and found the way again. Eventually we arrived at Kibbutz Tzora, parking near the pub.

That bale of hay amused and baffled me. Why park a bale of hay in front of your pub? Maybe someone just thought it looked cute.

Anyway, there is also a kosher winery on the pleasant grounds, with a grape arbor covering the entrance walkway. To the right there were several wooden tables, covered in attractive red tablecloths. No doubt the winery arranges evening tastings, or meals where you can sit with friends and while the time away over glasses of that good wine…

The visitor’s center was small, but well-lit, clean, and friendly. The kashrut certificates were easy to spot:

I bought my one bottle there: a full-bodied, single-vineyard Merlot called Shoresh. I’m glad I bought my wine there because it was the best winery we were able to visit that day. Apart from the Merlot, I tasted a delicious Rose and a white dessert wine that was too sweet for my palate, but which Mr. Baroness enjoyed.

The hostess was much cuter than the bale of hay, so I asked her to pose:

And then we went on our way.

The next winery on our trail was Mony. This one intrigued us because it is on the grounds of the Dir Rafat Monastery. It was bought from the monks by a private family, and the wines have, strangely enough, been kosher since 2005. It has earned 3 stars from the respected wine critic Daniel Rogov, but I found the wines, at least the kosher ones I tasted, pretty awful. Others present, tasting the pre-kosher vintages, assured me that they were better. I’ll take their word for it.

What was interesting to me was the tasting/party room. It was a cave where at one time, the monks had covered the floor with straw, and grown mushrooms.

Apart from wine, there were hand-pickled olives, jerrycans of olive oil, honey, and vinegar for sale.

Since it was chol ha mo’ed (the week of Sukkot), some of the wineries we planned to visit were closed. I was disappointed that Tepperberg was closed for renovations, and so was Katlav. In fact, we visited no more wineries. But we did see a spectacularly happy sukkah:

…and settled down for a picnic in a woods. A few picnic tables, some trees and rocks with lizards sunning themselves, and three hungry winos. Baroness Tapuzina and Her Better Half had sandwiches of Corsican Basil Bread, which looked divine. The recipe is on the Baroness’s blog. (I looked kind of measly with my few slices of cheese in a pitta.) They brought crisp potato chips. I brought vegetable soup in a thermos. Sliced cucumbers, green and black olives, and bottled water, and that was the sum of it. It wasn’t splendid, but it did the trick. The only thing really missing was some coffee. I had thought of making tehina cookies, but the holiday cooking had worn me out, so I didn’t. The funny thing was, the Baroness had also thought to make tehina cookies, but didn’t, for the same reason. It wouldn’t have been so bad if we’d both brought. More cookies for us!

This area was set up for campfires. It must be fun, on Lag B’Omer, to sit around on those stone benches and gaze into the leaping flames.

We sighed, stretched ourselves, and piled back into the car. It was time to go home.

What a relaxing day – at least for me, who didn’t drive. I am keeping my bottle of Shoresh from Tzora for a while, to get over the travel shock before I open it. Something nice to look forward to, and a pleasant souvenir of my day on the wine trail.

With a Baroness, no less.

Winemakers often mix fresh water and sugar with leftover grape skins to make a second-run wine. The Italian grappa is distilled out of such second-runs. There’s some flavor in the pressed stuff, and yeast. You get a light, quickly-finished wine out of it. But I do something with grape pomace that makes my fellow home-brewers wince. I take a bucketful of those squashed skins and mix them with other fruit juices. This mixture ferments and becomes a fruity wine that’s ready to drink in a few months.  I’ll mix peach nectar, goiaba, or pomegranate, or apple-cranberry juice with leftovers of Merlot or Cabernet Sauvignon or Reisling.  Result: delicious. Just off-dry, a dark rose that should be chilled before drinking. Yet the other winemakers grit their teeth when I describe the process. These are the same guys that refuse to sanitize their equipment; I don’t get why mixing juices grosses them out. You get a bigger bang for your buck and an entirely new, original, delicious wine.

Today I bottled a gallon of Merlot with Apple/Cranberry juice. It was a problem, refraining from empying one of those bottles by myself. But you judge how it looks:

And sitting in a spill of sunshine, it looked so pretty…

Leda Meredith’s book, Botany, Ballet, and Dinner From Scratch, has some wonderful recipes. One was vinegar flavored with garlic chive flowers. Now I have a handful of chive flowers in my windowsill pot. While I usually just let them go to seed, because I like discovering new little seedlings in unexpected places come next spring, making vinegar from them sounded attractive.

So I took these garlic chive flowers

and did this to them:

and now have this vinegar.

Leda’s book includes recipes for making your own vinegar. You go, Leda!

Three Russian guys run the fresh-meat section of my neighborhood supermarket. Avi is the senior. He is a tall, slow-moving man with tired brown eyes and a heavy grey moustache.  Reuven, short, dark, and restless, wears a kippa and is an expert on the kashrut followed by all our ethnic groups. Sometimes I see him sitting outside the building, smoking a cigarette nervously. Serge is handsome and a little sardonic, with a gold loop in one ear. He likes to discuss kitchen equipment, becoming almost lyrical on the subject of knives. They joke and comment among themselves in Russian, and nothing that goes on in the supermarket escapes them. For some reason they call me “Miri,” which nobody else does.

I enjoy exchanging a word with all of them, but Avi is my pal. We talk recipes, commiserate over each other’s health tsuris, wish each other a “Shabbat Shalom” when I’m in the supermarket on a Friday. It’s become my habit to give him a bottle of my home-made wine every year on his birthday. If I forget his birthday, he’ll remind me, no problem. I know his taste: he likes wine to be on the sweet side.

So this year I took a bottle of my Summer Fruit wine around to the supermarket. This is a wine made with peaches, apples, pears, the odd bag of cherries, apricots, or strawberries that’s been sitting in the freezer. When the wine is ready, I add a tiny bottle of rose essence and let it sit for another couple of weeks. Each batch improves as my skills improve, and this year it was very good indeed. Kind of on the strong side, though. I had been careless about gauging the alcohol by volume, but figured it was around 15%.

Well, I gave it to Avi, who thanked me and put the bottle away quickly. The following week, I stopped by the fresh meat counter, and the three of them were there, smiling at me. I looked from one to the other. Actually, they were grinning.

“What is it? Something funny about me today?”

Reuven and Serge said nothing, but got on with their chopping and wiping spaces down, smiling all the while. Avi put on a mock-solemn face and said,

“You don’t know what a bomb you dropped here, Miri.”

I was startled. “For Heaven’s sake…was it my wine?”

“It was good. And strong! It must have had 17% abv. I opened the bottle here and we all drank some – next thing, we were all standing around laughing. The customers kept asking what was so funny. We couldn’t exactly tell them we’d been drinking on the job.”

The two others smirked. I rolled my eyes.

Next year, I’m baking Avi a cake.

I had meant to post about things needing lots of photos, but there seems to be a problem with uploading media tonight. Meantime, I offer this poem. A word of explanation: gat means an ancient winepress.

Highway 6 slid away under our wheels and

Night dropped down.

We drove on to Beit Shemesh;

Ahead a storm gathered.

Fat drops spattered on the windshield.

From the passenger seat I watched

Long white legs of lightning stalking the sky

Between the rising Judean hills.

Thunder clapped: Attention!

The incandescent hills replied: Behold us.

My companion said:

“My hi-tech job is killing me.

I want to sell the house,

Give up the job,

Plant a vineyard in Emek Jezreel

And grow old there with my wife.”

The windshield wipers swished.

I sat silent. I too have my dreams.

In a parking lot:

Six bearded men in kippot

Standing around a grape crusher.

Their wives in apartments upstairs

Putting the children to bed

Me, standing to one side.

“She makes wine,” someone explained.

They shrugged .

In flat boxes lie the dusty black clusters;

Succulent round berries

Packed tightly on their stems.

Heft a whole one in your hand before you

Hoist a box-full and dump them

Into the metal rectangle

Where inside, a lathe starts turning.

Crushed fruit, seeds exposed

Bleeding purple juice

Streams forth richly, spilling;

Fills our blue plastic barrels.

From out there in the Judean hills,

A gust of cool, wet wind

Carries sharp odors of wild herbs.

It makes me turn away from

The business of the crush,

Turn my eyes towards those dark hills.

The men haul more boxes forward

Tumble grapes into the crusher

Under the electric light.

The Judean hills press in a little closer.

I know that

Lightning walks their dark terraces.

Over there, great white flickers suddenly part the night,

Reveal pines and brush swaying obedient,

Impartially reveal the ancient winepress.

Two basins carved into the living white rock,

A narrow carved channel between. Gat.

Who imagines now

The joyful harvests of ancient times?

They must have walked singing

Straight from vineyard to gat

In late afternoon, in September:

Men and women with tanned arms

Bearing baskets woven of green olive twigs

Baskets full of black fruit.

In the upper basin, our fathers crushed their grapes

Trampling, they must have shouted and laughed.

The rich juice flowed down its stone channel –

Those waiting by the lower basin

Rushed to fill up clay jugs.

Later, tired and quiet,

They must have walked home in the dark;

Stashed their jugs away inside a cool cave.

Nothing but cold water pours down the stone basins tonight.

The white rock, once stained purple

Sleeps another thousand years.

All the same, we still make wine.

“There you are, Rebbetzin, your lot is done.”

We pack our barrels into the car,

Turn around in the parking lot and start heading home.

I look back. In the circle of light,

The bearded men by the crusher

Are still pouring grapes in.

Parking-lot gat.

I checked my raspberry wine and found that I have two gallons of raspberry vinegar. Ack! Quickly, I removed it to a warm place in the kitchen where it can finish its transformation, far from the carboys so decoratively sitting around the living room. Well, as French winemakers say, God loves to make vinegar. When you’re making wine in an apartment with minimal temperature control, you have to expect an occasional failure. But my efforts have produced some (I must say) delicious Merlot/Cabernet Sauvignon blends as well as good wines of apricots, strawberries, pomelos, even raspberries. So what happened here? Well, the airlock stopping the mouth of carboy (fermentation vessel) was crooked – probably just enough air and maybe a fruit fly got into the fluid and spoiled my drink. (That airlock on that particular carboy was always getting tangled up in my skirt as I swept past. ) Raspberry shrub, anyone?

Looking into recipes for that old-fashioned drink, I see that people first steeped their raspberries in vinegar for several days, added 75% of the strained liquid’s weight in sugar, and boiled the mix till a syrup formed, about 15 minutes. They then flavored cold water with the red, sweet-sour liquid: recipes say anywhere from 1 tablespoon per glass to 1/3 of the glass as syrup. Guess it was a matter of taste. In Colonial America, they liked it sweet. Since my raspberries have obligingly gone ahead and made vinegar in my modern Israeli setting, I believe I’ll take a liter or so of it and simmer it to a syrup with sugar. Maybe it will taste good in soda water. Those old recipes all say it’s refreshing, tasty, good for a sore throat. I mean, that’s two gallons of raspberry vinegar, folks.

My raspberry wines have been good in the past, but expensive to make as the berries aren’t local. I bought frozen imported ones, convinced that the wine justified the fruit’s high price. With this little disaster, I tightened my resolve to stick to local ingredients as much as possible. On my shelves are luscious food-and-travel books by authors sensuously eating and cooking their ways through the Mediterranean. They make me start dreaming, feeling hungry. How nice it would be to make some of those recipes myself…imagine, chestnut-flour cake…but I pull up short as I remember that all those delicious peasant foods of Italy and France are based on raw materials grown or foraged close to home. Israel also has olives and wine; abundant, fresh, flavorful produce; and a great mix of ethnic groups from which to cull recipes. No great amount of chestnuts, though, except around Tu B’Shvat.

We do import a large part of our food – most our flour comes from imported wheat, for example. Few can claim to be real locavores in our small country, and I frankly think people don’t give the issue a minute’s thought. But I’ve come under the influence of Leda Meredith’s passionate crusade to reduce carbon transmission in our planet by eating local, seasonal foods – see her 250-mile diet. Meantime, I think I’ll concentrate on bottling the liqueurs of apricot and strawberry that I put up two months ago.

Mimi