Ha’aretz’s weekend magazine has a new series where they profile a parent and child. This weekend is Moti Teperberg, from Teperberg 1870, and his daughter Hila Lieber-Teperberg.
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A little history of Teperberg winery:
Moti is a fifth-generation Jerusalemite on his father Menachem’s side and 10th generation on his mother Rivka’s side. The foundations for the family’s wine business were laid by Avraham Teperberg, who immigrated to Ottoman Palestine from Austria in 1850, and two years later opened a store in Jerusalem that sold wine and other alcoholic beverages. His son, Ze’ev Zaide, caught the bug and in 1870 set up a winery called Efrat in the Old City, named for the ancient route of grapes that were transported from Bethlehem, also called Efrat in Genesis. The first winery in the country’s Jewish community, antedating Baron Rothschild’s venture by about 20 years, it was located in cellars beneath the Jewish Quarter. In 1925, the winery was relocated to the Romema neighborhood at the western edge of the new city. The business flourished and the Teperbergs sold bottles of sweet sacramental wine in large numbers. But then someone noticed that the winery’s logo, showing the two spies in Canaan with a cluster of grapes, had been copied by the big Carmel Mizrachi Winery. “There were legal proceedings with Carmel over the logo,” Moti recalls. “In the end there was a compromise, but the affair cost the family a lot of energy and money, and the business deteriorated.” Afterward, the Teperbergs were granted an exclusive franchise by the British Mandatory authorities to produce alcoholic beverages, and established a plant in Sarona, the community founded by the German Templars north of Jaffa. A few years later, the authorities allowed alcohol to be imported and the family went bankrupt.
After Israel’s establishment, Moti’s father and his brother went back to the wine business. The new winery, located in Jerusalem’s Mahane Yehuda produce market – in the backyard of Rachmo’s famous hummus place – manufactured some 80,000 bottles of sacramental wine. “That was the only kind of wine people in Israel drank at the time,” Moti says. “There was barely any dry red wine. Afterward, the Romanians and the Hungarians brought in the spritz trick: You put wine in a Sypholux soda-maker and create Champagne. I remember the Mahane Yehuda winery from my childhood. On holidays, during the harvest, I poured grapes into a machine and stomped on grapes with special boots.” In 1964, the winery moved to Motza, outside Jerusalem.
Moti has managed the winery since 1984. For the past six years it has been located near Kibbutz Tzora, on the slopes of the Judean Hills wine country, which evokes Tuscany. Moti joined the new wave of local winemakers who discovered the marvels of terroir (a fusion of terrain and climate ), and the ability of skilled local vintners to put out high-quality products. In an attempt to shake off the image of the sweet Efrat wines, Moti called his line Teperberg 1870; his is today the fourth biggest winery in the country. Hila works in the business as a market coordinator and is in charge of establishing a visitors’ center.
