Israeli wines come of age
Washington Jewish Week, Sep 25, 2008 by Kraft, Dina
RAMAT RAZIEL, Israel - It's harvest time at the Domaine Du Castel winery and crates full of small, plump grapes the color of blueberries are being loaded into a machine that removes them from their stems and pumps them through plastic piping into a towering, silver-colored vat.
This is how the two-year process of wine making begins in a terra cotta-colored building that originally was a chicken coop and is now considered the producer of some of Israel's finest wines.
This year, the winery was awarded the much-coveted four-star rating in one of the world's premier wine guides, Hugh Johnson's Pocket Wine Book 2008.
In Israel, "there is a wine revolution going on when it comes to quality," says the founder of Domaine Du Castel, Eli Ben Zaken.
A former restaurateur, he began making wine as a hobby until the top wine taster at Sotheby's in London came across one of his bottles and, much to his surprise, declared it "an outstanding" find, Ben Zaken said.
Wines have been produced in these Judean hills, not far from Jerusalem, since biblical times. The remains of a wine press from the Second Temple period was unearthed near where Domaine Du Castel's grapes are grown.
But only in the past 25 years or so have Israel's wines begun to take off around the world, transforming the reputation of kosher wine from the syrupy kosher kid-dush variety to world-class vintages.
A key turning point in the "coming out" of Israel's wines came just last year when Robert Parker, a leading American wine critic, tasted more than 40 Israeli wines for the first time. He awarded 14 wines 90-plus scores on a 100-point scale. A major achievement for any winery, the scores signified an exceptional world-class product.
A list of some of Parker's favorite Israeli wines was published in Business Week
The highest score, 93, went to a pair of Israeli red wines: the 2003 Yatir Forest wine from the Yatir Winery and the 2005 Gewurztraminer Heights Wine Yarden, a desert wine from the Golan Heights Winery.
Israel's wines began their metamorphosis in the 1980s. Some Israelis began studying winemaking in places such as France and California, returning home with the expertise not just on how to make wine but where to make wine. They began planting fewer vineyards in Israel's low-lying coastal areas and more in higher-altitude regions like the Golan Heights, the Upper Galilee and the Judean Hills, where the climate has proved better for growing quality grapes.
The Golan Heights Winery, established in 1984, played an important role in the quality revolution of Israeli wines, bringing in expertise from California and raising the bar for other wine makers here, said the director of wine development at the Carmel Winery, Adam Montefiore, who also has worked at the Golan Heights Winery.
"The planting had been going on in the wrong places of the coastal plane, where the soil was not right and with grapes that were not the right varieties," Rogov said. "In the Golan Heights, the primarily volcanic soil is excellent for grapes and the chalky, volcanic red clay of the Upper Galilee is also very good."
The return of modern winemaking to the region began in 1882 with the investment in wineries in Zichron Yaakov and Rishon Lezion by philanthropist Baron Edmond de Rothschild. The baron, who in France owned Chateaux Lafite, arguably the world's most famous winery, hoped a wine industry would help support Jewish settlement in what was then Ottoman-ruled Palestine
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