Daniel sent us this one — he's figuring out his wine palate, and he's landed in that tricky zone where he likes dry reds but doesn't want to get punched in the mouth by tannins, and sweetness is off the table entirely. He's in Jerusalem, wants specific grape recommendations, a note-taking system that actually works, apartment storage that won't require remodeling his rental, and a straight answer on whether decanting is actually necessary or just theater. There's a lot to unpack here.
The thing is, he's not asking for anything weird. This is probably the most common preference profile that nobody talks about. Most people think the red wine dial only has two settings — sweet and soft on one end, dry and punishing on the other. But what he's describing is a specific chemical target, and once you understand what you're actually chasing, the whole wine shop stops being intimidating.
Where do we even start with this?
Let's start with what "dry but not tannic" actually means, because those two things get conflated constantly. Dryness is just the absence of residual sugar — technically, anything below about two grams per liter of sugar left after fermentation. That's it. Tannin is a completely separate chemical compound that comes from grape skins, seeds, stems, and oak barrels. They have nothing to do with each other. You can have a bone-dry wine with zero perceptible tannin, and you can have a sweet wine that's massively tannic, though that's rarer.
The listener's profile is essentially: keep the sugar out, keep the skin-contact punishment to a minimum, and keep the acid high enough that the wine has structure without needing tannin to do the work.
And that's a real chemical balance. Tannin provides structure — it's the backbone, the thing that gives wine grip and aging potential. If you're pulling back on tannin, you need acid to step in and provide that architecture instead. Otherwise you get flabby wine that just sits there. The listener wants wines from thin-skinned grapes that ripen early, made with minimal skin contact during fermentation, and ideally aged in neutral oak or stainless steel rather than new barrels.
What you're saying is, this isn't a weird niche preference. This is actually a coherent wine philosophy. It's just that the wine world talks about tannin like it's the whole point of red wine.
Right, and that's because for a long time, the most famous red wines in the world — Bordeaux, Barolo, Napa Cabernet — were built around tannin as the structural element. But there's a whole parallel universe of red wines that use acid and fruit purity instead. And Israel, specifically, is a fantastic place to explore this because we have old-vine Carignan, we have Gamay being made by serious producers, and we have Pinot Noir from the Golan Heights at prices that would make someone in Burgundy weep.
Let's get into the specific grapes then. What should someone walk into a Jerusalem wine shop and actually ask for?
First on my list is Carignan. This is the sleeper grape of Israeli wine right now. Carignan was historically a workhorse blending grape — high acid, high yield, not taken seriously. But Israel has these old-vine Carignan plots in the Judean Hills, some of them sixty to eighty years old, and when you treat old-vine Carignan with respect, you get something extraordinary. The Recanati Carignan from the Judean Hills is the reference point here — the twenty twenty-three vintage is running about seventy-two shekels, thirteen and a half percent alcohol, aged in neutral oak so there's no new-barrel tannin load. I'd rate the tannin at about three out of ten. It's got this wild, brambly fruit character, bright acid, and a kind of earthy rusticity that's very different from polished international styles.
Carignan is the entry point. What's the tannin mechanism there — why is it naturally lower?
Carignan has relatively thick skins, actually, but the magic is in how Israeli producers are handling it. They're doing shorter maceration times — maybe seven to ten days on the skins instead of the three or four weeks you'd do for Cabernet. And they're pressing gently, often using basket presses rather than aggressive bladder presses that would extract more tannin. Plus, the old vines produce lower yields with more concentrated fruit, so the balance tips toward fruit expression rather than structural extraction. If you see a Carignan from Recanati or Dalton in that sixty to ninety shekel range, that's your baseline.
If Carignan is step one, what's step two?
This is the grape of Beaujolais, and it's essentially built for this preference profile. Gamay is a thin-skinned grape that naturally produces low-tannin, high-acid, brightly fruity wines. In Israel, Flam has been making a Gamay that's genuinely excellent — the twenty twenty-four vintage is about eighty-five shekels, completely unoaked, all stainless steel fermentation. It's got this crushed strawberry and wet stone thing going on, with a tannin rating of maybe two out of ten. Tzora also does interesting things with Gamay in their Judean Hills vineyards. The key with Gamay is you're getting purity of fruit without any structural interference from oak or extraction.
I've had the Flam Gamay. It's almost shockingly drinkable — like, you look down and the bottle's empty and you're not sure how that happened.
That's the Gamay effect. It's the session beer of red wine. And that's not a criticism — drinkability is a virtue that the wine world has spent decades pretending doesn't matter. Now, the third grape I'd point to is Pinot Noir, and this is where the value proposition in Israel gets absurd. The Golan Heights Winery Hermon Pinot Noir, the twenty twenty-two vintage, is fifty-five shekels. For a Pinot Noir that actually tastes like Pinot Noir — that earthy, cherry-driven, silky character — fifty-five shekels is basically a pricing error.
Fifty-five shekels for Pinot Noir sounds like someone in accounting fell asleep.
It's real, and it's widely available. Pinot Noir is the classic low-tannin, high-acid red grape — the skins are so thin that you can see through them, and the tannin levels are naturally about a quarter of what you'd get from Cabernet Sauvignon. The Golan Heights version isn't going to compete with grand cru Burgundy, but for someone building a palate, it's a perfect reference point. You get the silky texture, the red berry fruit, the earthy undertone, and almost no perceptible tannic grip.
The fourth grape?
Grenache is interesting because it can go either way — in some regions it produces massive, high-alcohol, tannic monsters, but in the right hands, especially in Mediterranean climates like Israel's, it makes wines that are all about red fruit, white pepper, and a kind of juicy, open-knit texture. Yatir and Teperberg both do solo Grenache bottlings in the eighty to one hundred twenty shekel range. The tannins in Grenache are naturally softer and rounder than Cabernet or Syrah — they're more about texture than grip. And Grenache has the advantage of higher alcohol without heaviness, so you get warmth and generosity without the mouth-drying effect.
We've got Carignan, Gamay, Pinot Noir, Grenache. Four grapes, all under one hundred twenty shekels, all fitting the dry-but-not-tannic profile. What about blends?
This is where the GSM blend comes in — Grenache, Syrah, Mourvèdre. It's a classic southern Rhône combination, and the reason it works for this preference profile is that Grenache softens Syrah's tannins. Syrah on its own can be pretty structured, but in a GSM where Grenache is the dominant grape, you get the aromatic complexity without the tannic load. Psagot and Tishbi both make GSMs in the eighty to one hundred shekel range. Look for blends where Grenache is listed first — that means it's the highest percentage.
What about the classic Bordeaux blend? Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot — that seems like the opposite of what we're recommending.
It depends on the proportions. A Bordeaux blend that's heavy on Merlot and light on Cabernet can actually work. Merlot has softer, plusher tannins than Cabernet Sauvignon, and if the percentage is right, the wine feels smooth rather than structured. The Castel Grand Vin is the famous Israeli example — it's about sixty percent Merlot, forty percent Cabernet, and it runs about one hundred ten shekels. That's a serious wine that still fits the profile. But if you see a blend that's Cabernet-dominant, or worse, if you see Petit Verdot or Tannat in the mix, steer clear. Those are tannin bombs.
Let's talk about what to avoid, because knowing what not to buy is half the battle.
Cabernet Sauvignon is the obvious one. Israeli Cabernet, especially from warmer sites, can be massively tannic — we're talking grip levels of seven or eight out of ten. Unless it's got five-plus years of bottle age, which softens tannins through polymerization, avoid it. Petit Verdot is another one — it's a blending grape in Bordeaux that adds color and structure, and on its own or in high percentages it's like drinking sandpaper. Tannat is basically a dare. And most Israeli Petite Sirah is extremely extracted — it's a grape that naturally has high tannin and high color, and Israeli producers tend to push it even further.
What about the wine shop itself? The listener is in Jerusalem — where do you actually go, and what do you say without sounding like you're auditioning for a sommelier role?
Hakerem in the German Colony is the best starting point. They have a wide Israeli selection and the staff actually knows the wines they're selling. Wine and More in the shuk is also excellent — they've got a slightly funkier selection, more small producers. The phrase to use is "adin v'yavesh" — delicate and dry. That's the Hebrew shorthand for exactly this preference. And mention that you're looking for thin-skinned grapes, low extraction. Any decent wine shop employee will immediately know what you mean and can point you to Carignan, Gamay, and Pinot Noir.
"Adin v'yavesh." That's useful. What about the price sweet spot? The listener mentioned not wanting to break the bank.
There was a study in the Journal of Wine Economics in twenty twenty-three that looked specifically at the Israeli market, and they found that the sixty to one hundred twenty shekel bracket offers the best quality-to-price ratio. Below fifty shekels, you're getting bulk wine that often has commercial tannin powder added for structure — yes, that's a real thing, winemakers can buy powdered tannin and add it during fermentation. Above one hundred fifty shekels, you're mostly paying for the label, the oak program, and the prestige of the vintage. The sweet spot is sixty-five to one hundred twenty shekels, and for the wines we're recommending, you're right in that zone.
Of course there is.
It's not necessarily bad — it's a winemaking tool like any other. But it means that cheap wine can be artificially grippy in a way that doesn't match the fruit, and that's exactly the unpleasant experience the listener is trying to avoid.
We've mapped the grapes and the shops and the price points. But how do you actually remember what you liked? The listener mentioned having a great wine at a restaurant and then completely blanking on what it was.
This is the note-taking section, and I want to be really practical here. There are apps — Vivino is the obvious one. It lets you scan a barcode or take a photo of the label, and it pulls up the wine's information and crowd-sourced ratings. It's got about two point three million Israeli wine labels in its database as of April this year. But here's the problem: only about twelve percent of those Israeli labels have more than ten user ratings. The sample sizes are tiny, and the scores are often inflated because people rate wines they bought and want to feel good about their purchase.
Vivino is useful for scanning and cataloging, but don't trust the ratings.
Use Vivino as a label scanner and a personal log, not as a recommendation engine. What I'd actually recommend is pairing it with a private Google Sheet or a Notion database. The columns are simple: wine name, vintage, producer, grape or grapes, price, where you bought it, date tasted, three words for aroma, three words for taste, finish length — short, medium, or long — food pairing, rating one to five, and a simple yes or no on whether you'd buy it again.
Three words for aroma, three words for taste. That's manageable. What do those words actually look like for someone who doesn't have a wine vocabulary?
Skip the jargon entirely. Don't say "tannic" or "oaky" or "minerally." Use words you actually understand. For aroma: strawberry, wet stone, violet, black pepper, leather, cherry, earth, herbs. For taste: bright, smooth, grippy, juicy, thin, rich, short, long. The goal isn't to sound like a tasting note in Wine Spectator — it's to build a personal reference library that you can actually use. After ten wines, you look at the "would buy again" column and see patterns. If every wine you rated a five is Gamay or Carignan, congratulations, you've found your lane.
What about the restaurant problem? You're at Machneyuda, you order a bottle, it's fantastic, and two weeks later you can't remember what it was.
Take a photo of the bottle and the wine list page before the server opens it. Most Jerusalem restaurants — Machneyuda, Satya, Mona, Chakra — they're totally fine with you snapping a picture. Then immediately text the photo to yourself with a voice memo. And I mean immediately — don't wait until after dinner, because by then you've had half the bottle and your memory is warm and generous and entirely unreliable.
Voice memo script?
Keep it to twenty seconds. Something like: "May fifteenth, Satya, the Flam Gamay twenty twenty-four. Bright red fruit, no bitterness, paired perfectly with the lamb kebab. Would buy a case." That's it. You've captured the wine, the context, the impression, and the verdict. Later, when you're entering it into your sheet, you've got everything you need.
This builds over time. After twenty or thirty entries, you've essentially built yourself a personalized wine recommendation engine that's based on your actual preferences, not some critic's palate.
It's the three-three-three method — three words for nose, three for palate, three for finish. It's enough to be useful without being so burdensome that you stop doing it after two weeks. The WSET Systematic Approach to Tasting has something like thirty criteria, and for a professional sommelier that makes sense. For someone who just wants to remember what they liked at dinner, it's complete overkill.
Alright, so you've bought the wine, you've taken your notes. Now the bottle is sitting on your kitchen counter and it's July in Jerusalem and your apartment is approximately the temperature of a pizza oven. Where do you put it?
This is where Jerusalem apartment storage gets real. The average temperature in Jerusalem during July last year was twenty-nine degrees Celsius, which is two degrees above the twenty-year average. That's hot enough to cook wine in about a week. The enemies of wine are heat, light, vibration, and temperature fluctuation. So let's eliminate the worst options first: the top of the fridge is terrible because fridges vibrate constantly and that vibration accelerates chemical reactions in the wine. The window sill is terrible because UV light degrades tannins and causes what's called "light strike," which makes wine smell like wet cardboard. The cabinet above the oven is terrible because every time you cook, you're heat-cycling your wine.
Basically every surface in a typical Jerusalem kitchen is a wine murder zone.
The best option is a dark closet on an interior wall, at floor level. Floor level is cooler because heat rises. A cardboard box works perfectly — it insulates against temperature swings and blocks light. If you want to get slightly fancier, a basic wooden wine rack in that same closet is fine. The target temperature range is twelve to eighteen degrees Celsius. Jerusalem's spring and fall are naturally in that range. Winter gets colder, but cold doesn't damage wine the way heat does — it just slows down the aging process. The problem months are July through September.
If you're building a collection — say ten or more bottles — is a wine cooler worth it?
For ten-plus bottles, yes. A twelve-bottle thermoelectric cooler — something like a Kalamera, which you can find on Zap for about six hundred shekels — is a worthwhile investment. Thermoelectric is better than compressor-based for apartments because it doesn't vibrate. It's not going to give you perfect cellar conditions, but it'll keep your wine at a stable sixteen to eighteen degrees through the summer, which is enough to prevent heat damage. You don't need a two-thousand-shekel unit. The diminishing returns on wine coolers kick in fast.
Now the question that every wine article treats like a sacred ritual: decanting. Is it actually necessary?
For the wines we're recommending in this episode, the answer is mostly no. Decanting does two things: it aerates the wine, which can soften tannins and open up aromas, and it separates the wine from any sediment that's formed in the bottle. For young, low-tannin reds like Carignan and Gamay, decanting actually strips their primary fruit character. You're essentially blowing off the exact aromas that make those wines enjoyable. I've done side-by-side tastings where a decanted Gamay tasted flat and muted compared to the same wine poured straight from the bottle.
When do you actually decant?
Three conditions: the wine is more than three years old and might have sediment, you taste harshness or a closed-down quality on the first sip that suggests it needs air, or you're drinking something with aggressive tannins that you want to soften. For the Recanati Carignan, the Flam Gamay, the Golan Heights Pinot Noir — skip the decanter entirely. Just open the bottle fifteen minutes before you drink it. That's enough time for any bottle shock from storage to dissipate without blowing off the delicate aromatics.
Fifteen minutes, not two hours. The decanting-industrial complex has been lying to us.
The decanting-industrial complex is built around big, structured wines — young Barolo, young Bordeaux, Napa Cabs — that need hours of air to become drinkable. But the listener specifically said they don't like those wines. So the advice that applies to those wines doesn't apply here. For the profile we're discussing, decanting is at best unnecessary and at worst actively harmful to what makes the wine good.
Let me pull this together into something actionable. You walk into Hakerem, you ask for "adin v'yavesh," you pick up a Recanati Carignan for seventy-two shekels or a Flam Gamay for eighty-five. You take a photo of the label before you open it. You pour a glass, wait fifteen minutes, taste it. You text yourself three words for aroma, three for taste, three for finish. You store the leftover bottle in a dark closet on the floor, not on top of the fridge. You do this ten times with different grapes, and suddenly you've got a personal wine database that tells you exactly what you like and why.
If you want to accelerate the process, the Taste of Israel wine festival happens every June at the Jerusalem Theatre. Fifty shekels entry gets you about twenty tastes. It's the cheapest way to sample across producers and grapes without committing to full bottles. Walk through, taste everything that fits the profile, take photos of the labels you like, and you've essentially done six months of wine exploration in one afternoon.
June — that's literally right now.
The other budget tip is bin ends — the last few bottles of a vintage that shops are trying to clear off the shelf. Both Hakerem and Wine and More discount these by twenty to thirty percent. The wine is perfectly fine, they just need the shelf space for the new vintage. If you see a bin end of a Carignan or Gamay from a producer you recognize, grab it.
Before we wrap, I want to touch on something that's happening in Israeli wine right now that actually plays directly into the listener's preference. The twenty twenty-six harvest in the Judean Hills was unusually hot. What does that mean for tannin levels?
It's counterintuitive, but hotter vintages can actually produce riper, softer tannins. The physiological ripeness of the grape skins — when the tannins go from green and aggressive to round and polymerized — that process accelerates in heat. So wines from the twenty twenty-six vintage might actually be more approachable for the listener's profile, even from grapes that are normally more structured. The trade-off is higher alcohol, because riper grapes have more sugar to ferment. If you see a twenty twenty-six wine with fourteen and a half percent alcohol, that's the hot vintage talking, and it might actually work in your favor in terms of tannin softness.
Check the alcohol percentage as a rough proxy. Higher ABV probably means riper, softer tannins.
And the other trend to watch is the rise of minimal-intervention Israeli wineries. Producers like Jivon and Shvo are doing whole-cluster fermentation with zero additives, which means they're not adding commercial tannin powder or using aggressive extraction techniques. These wines often have lower perceptible tannin because they're made with a lighter touch from start to finish. They're slightly harder to find — you'll see them at Wine and More or at specialist shops — but they're worth seeking out if you want to taste what Israeli grapes do when they're left alone.
Whole-cluster fermentation — that's fermenting the grapes with the stems still attached?
Yes, and it sounds like it would add tannin — stems have tannin — but the stems also absorb some of the anthocyanins and actually buffer the extraction. Plus, whole clusters mean less crushing and less skin contact overall. The result is often a wine with more aromatic lift and less grippy structure. It's a technique that's been used in Burgundy for centuries and it's finally catching on here.
The Israeli wine scene is actually moving in a direction that benefits this preference profile — lighter extraction, more acid-driven wines, less reliance on new oak and tannin structure.
It really is. Ten years ago, the Israeli wine identity was basically "we can make big, extracted, internationally-styled reds too." Now there's a whole generation of winemakers who are more interested in drinkability, in freshness, in expressing the specific character of the Judean Hills and the Galilee rather than chasing Parker points. For someone building a palate right now, it's a exciting time to be drinking Israeli wine.
Let me give the listener three things they can do this week. One: go to Hakerem or Wine and More, say "adin v'yavesh," and buy a Carignan and a Gamay — total cost maybe one hundred fifty shekels. Two: set up a Google Sheet or Notion page with the columns we described, and commit to entering every wine you drink for the next month. Three: take a photo of every bottle before you open it and text yourself a voice memo if you're at a restaurant. That's it. Those three habits, built over a few weeks, will do more for your wine knowledge than reading a hundred tasting guides.
If you can make it to the Taste of Israel festival at the Jerusalem Theatre this June, do it. Fifty shekels, twenty tastes, and you'll walk out knowing more about your own preferences than most people learn in years of casual drinking.
One open question I want to leave listeners with — and this is something I'm curious about — is how the twenty twenty-six harvest's heat spike actually plays out in the bottle. The theory says riper, softer tannins. But theory and reality have a complicated relationship. If you're drinking a twenty twenty-six Israeli red and noticing the tannin profile, pay attention to the alcohol level and see if Herman's prediction holds up.
While you're at it, if you find a Gamay or Carignan that blows you away, write it down. Send it to us. We're always looking for new bottles to argue about.
Now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: The largest quipu ever discovered was found in the Gobi Desert in nineteen thirty-two, measuring over forty-seven meters in length and containing more than eighteen thousand individual knots — despite the fact that the Inca civilization, which used quipu for accounting, never reached anywhere near Mongolia.
...right.
This has been My Weird Prompts, produced by the inscrutable Hilbert Flumingtop. If you enjoyed this episode, drop us a review wherever you listen — it helps people find the show. Open a bottle, take a photo, text yourself three words, and we'll see you next week.
