Episode 127: Simon Jacob focuses on The 17th Of Tammuz: The Wine Makers' Fast.

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The 17th Of Tammuz: The Wine Makers' Fast

There's something almost absurd about releasing a wine episode on a fast day — a show about ripeness and pleasure and the glass you raise, dropped into the one season built around setting that glass down. I did it on purpose.

There's something almost absurd about releasing a wine episode on a fast day — a show about ripeness and pleasure and the glass you raise, dropped into the one season built around setting that glass down. I did it on purpose.

Because the 17th of Tammuz is, of all the fasts on the Jewish calendar, the winemaker's fast. It marks the day the daily wine libation stopped on the altar in Jerusalem — the oldest, steadiest act of Jewish worship, an act of wine, going silent under siege. From that day the calendar walks us down into mourning, and into the weeks when we set wine aside entirely.

But this is not only an episode about loss. While we mourn, out on the hillsides of Israel the grapes are turning on the vine — véraison sweeping across the Galilee and the Judean Hills in the very weeks we sit lowest. The season opens with wine taken away on the 17th of Tammuz, and turns, six weeks later, on Tu B'Av — the day the daughters of Jerusalem danced in the vineyards, and the day, by the law of orlah, that a newly planted vine's clock officially begins. From the libation that stopped, to the fruit that always comes home to Jerusalem.

This is a day to cry for all we've lost — but not without hope for our future. Keep an empty glass close. You won't drink from it tonight. But by the end, I don't think you'll ever look at it, or at a vineyard in summer, the same way again.

A note: out of respect for the fast, no wine was poured in this episode. The bottle waits — as it should.