As another week filled with news of tragedy passed, I have been consumed with fear and uncertainty. While I feel helpless in many ways, I plead for the release of...
Generational family businesses are common in the wine industry. The passion and love for wine is passed from generation to generation. The younger generations learn from their parents and grandparents and then pass on the same to their children. Yair Margalit started Margalit Winery in Israel with the idea of building a business for future generations in his family. Today his son Asaf is running the winery. I had the pleasure to speak with both Asaf and Yair about their story and what I loved so much was the relationship between father and son. Asaf talked about how he received one of the best educations in wine from his father Yair, the author of two of the most comprehensive wine books and I share their story in the Napa Valley Register which you can read here.
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We look up to our parents. We learn from our parents. They are our role models and our teachers. We then go to school or work and study under experts in our field of choice.
But when your father is the author of "Concepts in Wine Chemistry," as well as thesuccessive, "Concepts in Wine Technology," the most comprehensive education you can get on wine making is from your father.
Dr. Yair Margalit studied chemistry at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, where he received his master’s degree and a Ph.D in physical chemistry, with a focus on nuclear magnetic resonance. He worked for five years at the Israel Institute of Biological Research where he was the head of the physical chemistry department. When he was a visiting research professor at UC Davis in the chemistry department, he developed an interest in wine.
Ironically, the door of the enology department was literally in front of the physical chemistry room and Yair was drawn to it. While on his first sabbatical, he took some courses and found that his background in chemistry made enology an easy subject for him. By his second and third sabbaticals to the U.S., Yair came to work as a scientist in the Department of Enology, as well as Department of Chemistry. Yair knew at that point that wine would be his second career.
