An Unlikely Wine Revolution

Israel’s Golan Heights Winery produces world-class wines.

Harvey Finkel

My first inkling that things had changed was my flight to Israel. El Al had been known for the best security in the business, for always being late, for barely swallowable food and drink and surly service. My flight was on time, the meal was tasty, and the flight crew set a new standard of graciousness. The security is still superb, though handled with more finesse.

During my previous visits to Israel, wine was at best pedestrian, and decent food limited to plainly prepared fish and Arab cuisine. Now, however, food and wine are prime foci of conversation and debate, of publications and schools, of a burgeoning industry. It seems a new winery opens every week. One can now dine on fine and varied fare and drink very well indeed. The palpable energy was, for me, brought to a fervent ferment at the Yarden 2007 Food and Wine Festival.

In a country at once biblically ancient and ultramodern, the status of wine, spanning 6,000 years, has ridden a roller coaster. Noah, the first known winegrower, was the first outed abuser. A sophisticated viniculture was established in ancient days, when wines produced in Israel, recognized for high quality, were widely exported as far back as the Bronze Age. Wine maintained an integral role in Hebrew, and later Christian, religious observance. The Moslem conquest in the seventh century forced the wine trade into dormancy, until a halting reawakening in the mid-19th century. No one now knows what grape varieties were vinified before 636. During the last 25 years, revelation of favored vineyard sites and the use of modern technology by internationally trained growers and winemakers have revolutionized the quality of Israeli wine, now again widely exported and appreciated.

According to archaeologist William Dever, most of the settlements of the early Iron Age Israelites were located not in the coastal plains or the lowlands, “but in the sparsely populated hill country extending from the Upper and Lower Galilee, into the hills of Samaria and Judah, and southward into the northern Negev,” where vines were planted, precisely where fine wines are grown today. Too bad the reestablished viticulture of the nineteenth century wasn’t favored by the same wisdom or luck that prevailed 3,200 years earlier.

After a century of growing grapes in low, hot, humid areas, making wines no one should boast about, a turning point occurred in 1972. Professor Cornelius Ough of U.C. Davis suggested the Golan Heights as a likely location to grow fine wine grapes. Vines were first planted there in 1976, and the Golan Heights Winery, which has led the wine revolution in Israel ever since, was established in 1983 by a partnership of four collective farms and four cooperatives. The enterprise continues to expand. It controls 1,500 acres of vineyards in 17 sites, producing more than a half-million cases of wine a year from 6,000 tons of grapes. Much of the viticulture is organic. Advantage is taken of varying microclimates. One vineyard, Loa, lying at the base of a dormant volcanic crater, is a cool-air trap. Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, Gewürztraminer, Riesling, Pinot Noir, Sangiovese, and Viognier are grown in the higher and cooler northern Golan; Cabernet, Merlot, Malbec, Syrah, and Gamay in the center; and Muscats and some Cabernet and Syrah in the southern Golan.

The Golan is a hilly plateau extending 40 miles from north to south, 12 miles east to west, in the northeastern corner of the country, bordering Lebanon to the north, Syria to the east. Sitting high above the Jordan Valley and Sea of Galilee, the Heights provided a platform from which the Syrians shelled the farmlands below before 1967. Should an eventual peace treaty require return of the land to Syria, the modular winery could be moved, but new vineyard land would have to be developed elsewhere in the Upper Galilee.

Elevations of vineyards range from 1,300 to 3,900 feet. Summer days are warm, sunny, breezy and dry. (It rains, and may snow, mainly in the winter.) Nights are cool. The soil is chiefly well-drained volcanic basalt. Dormant volcanic cones lurk in the background, and military observation posts try to blend with the terrain at the edges of vineyards.

Intensive efforts, using advanced scientific technology, are applied to achieve uniform ripening throughout each vineyard, to avoid inclusion of under- or over-ripe fruit, mechanically harvested. This includes meticulous water management by drip irrigation and tailoring of the vines’ leaf canopies. The ultimate test — tasting the grapes — is not neglected. Ninety percent of the vineyards in the Golan are farmed by Golan Heights Winery. The region, home to 35,000 people, also raises apples, pears, cherries, and other fruit, plus cattle. Before the 1967 war, the Golan was impoverished and unproductive. Now, it thrives, producing most of the best wine in Israel.

The high-tech, fully temperature-controlled winery in Katzrin is mostly outdoors. The small oak barrels are mostly French. The wines are tiered in three lines: Yarden (Jordan), the top level, Gamla, and Golan. We’ll be concerning ourselves with the Yardens, of which I tasted 30 vintages of 18 wines. All are very good. I’ll select a manageable number of exemplars to mention specifically. Twenty percent of production is exported worldwide.

Victor Schoenfeld, a 44-year-old Californian, chief winemaker since 1992, is a U.C. Davis graduate with experience in Sonoma, Napa, Champagne, and Israel. Two of his three associate winemakers trained in Australia, one in Italy. I wonder how they keep track of all the vintages of the 35 wines, plus the many experimental lots (my mother seldom kept two sons straight).

Blanc de Blancs 2000, $20, a Champagne-method wine made entirely from cool-grown Chardonnay harvested at 18.9 Brix, is crisp, austere, complex, and fine. I could drink it all day, and I nearly did. What a bargain! Gewürztraminer 2006, $12, is a balanced, delicate, exquisite expression of the litchi facet of the varietal. Katzrin Chardonnay 2004, $26, is a big wine aging gracefully: lots of fruit, lots of oak, put together nicely. It’s good even with “red-wine foods.” Katzrin designates the winery’s best selection of vineyard blocks, nurtured for long-lasting richness and complexity. Pinot Noirs 2002 and 2003, $28, are very good: fragrant and aromatic, and ripe with black fruit, respectively. Neither echoes Burgundy; both suggest a continuing search for a style. The Syrahs 2002 and 2003, $28, are likewise enjoyable wines flitting between Australia and the Rhône in style. Merlots are very sensitive to growing-season weather, sometimes showing vegetal greenness. They sound more bass notes than Cabernets.

Cabernet Sauvignons are the gems in Yarden’s crown. Cabernet Sauvignon 2003, $28, is elegant, complex, intense, long, and maturing nicely. The wine is aged in French oak barrels, 40 percent new for 18 months. Its siblings, 1999-2002, warrant admirable consistency. Cabernet Sauvignon El Rom Vineyard 2003, $36, is selected from a single vineyard at 3,600 feet, and aged 18 months in 70 percent new French oak. Elegant and suave, this wine will be irresistible once it resolves its tannins. Red Katzrin 2003, $100, contains a little Merlot and Cabernet Franc. Made only about every three years in small quantity, it spends 24 months in new French oak: elegant, complex, long, with green olive hints and intense soft tannins; great future.

Heights Wine 2004, $24/375 ml, is an ice wine. Gewürztraminer harvested at 28 Brix is slowly frozen, then gently pressed and slowly fermented. Sweet, yet varietally true, this is a perfect dessert wine.

Part of the Golan Heights Winery’s expansion headed west. The impressive Galil Mountain Winery, established in 2000 in the wild, mountainous Upper Galilee in north-central Israel near the Lebanese border, is owned two-thirds by Golan Heights Winery, one-third by the Yiron collective. Five vineyards totaling 222 acres had been planted in 1995 and in 2000 at between 1,400 and 2,300 feet by four collective farms and one cooperative. They supply 1,000 tons of grapes, 90 percent red. Soil here is mostly terra rosa over limestone, with volcanic basalt at Yiron.

Micha Vaadia, a 41-year-old Israeli, has been chief winemaker for two years. He earned a bachelor’s degree in agriculture at Hebrew University, a master’s in oenology at U.C. Davis, and has worked in California, New Zealand, Argentina, and at Golan Heights. His approach is simple, direct, unpretentious. He supervises the production of 60,000 cases, of which 20 percent is exported.

Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Pinot Noir, Syrah, Sangiovese, Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, and Riesling are grown. Sauvignon Blanc 2006, $15, is long and lemon-lime refreshing. Some of the reds are unoaked, drinkable early, and altogether admirable in fruit and structure: Merlot 2006, $18, Cabernet Sauvignon 2006, $15. Pinot Noir 2005, $15, is fragrant, with fine, intense fruit. It spent ten months in French oak barrels. Shiraz Cabernet 2005, $18, is spicy, with good acid balance. Aged in American oak, it would go well with barbecue. Yiron 2002, $24, is the “flagship offering”: Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot, 16 months in French oak. Suave, minty, tarry, it would be at home in the Napa Valley.

These two wineries, then, follow the Psalmist, to “bring forth ... wine that maketh glad the heart of man.”