Wine Tasting, Vineyards, in France

Wine News (23)

Back from the grazing fieldBack home
On goat cheese, wine, garden shoes, crashing birds....and Wal Mart
As soon as I came to the Loire, back from my trip in Israel, I rode to the old farm lady who makes goat cheese from only two goats (remember this goat-cheese story on Wineterroirs), with the idea to visit her and buy a couple of goat cheeses. As I was parking the bike in front of the farm, I could see her in the far coming in my direction as she was coming back from the field with her two goats (picture]. Alas she hadn't any goat cheese left that day and I stopped at another goat-cheese farm that I have never reported on until now (could come up one of these days) and bought one of their raw-milk goat cheese. I had it that same evening with a bottle of Sauvignon that I had just bought in bulk to André Fouassier for 1,5 Euro a liter and bottled myself. Unfiltered wine (you can really see it), without the usual sulphur-addings of the bottling. The sticker I wrote on the bottle neck says Fouassier A. 08, vif (means vivid) because I bought him Sauvignon from two different vats, one being more rich (gras) and the other being more fresh and vivid. The cheese was a 8-day cheese, at the beginning of its elevage, already a bit refined and dry but not yet very expressive in terms of aroma strength. I paid 2,2 Euro for it. It was 8pm when I took the cheese and the bottle out to the garden, but still so hot with the sun, and I had to find a shadowy place near the hedge and the cloth line to enjoy this treat.
Being back home is one of the pleasures of travelling, you digest your experiences and put them in balance with your home surroundings, it's so different. On my way to the Loire (on the motorcycle), I rode part of the way on the Nationale 20 behind three guys on Harleys (actually, I saw later that there was a woman biker among them). Great experience, the sound and everything... Two of them had 34 license plates (34 is the administrative number of Herault, a departement in the southern France) and the 3rd had British license plates. The way they were riding together had an Easy Rider feel, I just missed the music, this was a great thundering experience... It gave me the will to try one of those machines one day, but I wonder if they're reliable (I'm not a mechanic and hate having to fix my machine).
Another strange thing happened to me that day. I'm used to watch for wild animals on the forested roads of the Loire, roe deers or wild boars, but didn't see that one coming : while riding as a relatively high speed on a deserted forest road in the Sologne, I saw in a millisecond a white thing coming from my right that struck me on the chest. Destabilized a moment, I kept my way, wondering if I had any thing broken, like my collarbone (that's were it struck me), but everything was OK, except the bird (that was a bird), I stopped and went back looking on both sides of the road and found the poor thing laying dead on the ground : a jay. Lesson of this story, if in the future you don't see a new post in, say, a month, that could be a wild boar instead of a jay...

A Grape-Grower's Tale (Israel)

Shay Nir in the machinery & tools storage barn Moshav Mata, Jerusalem hills.
Thank you again to Ze'ev who made a keen intelligence-gathering here and led me to this moshav for this last Israeli story after foreseeing that there was a lot to learn and see there.
This story is about very important people for the wines of Israel, people who are very rarely in the spotlight, the growers. Even in France, I've never made a report on a grower although many do such an important job, and here I am in Israel reporting on one...
Growing grapes and making wine are still often very separate sectors in Israel, a country where contracted vineyards and purchased grapes are the norm. The growers have been more and more distancing themselves from the high-yields practices of the past, an era started when the Baron de Rotschild paid the growers exclusively by the volume of grapes without regard on the link between yields and quality. Here are these growers, the Nir brothers, who seem to work enthusiasticly, planting carefully-selected varieties on land leased by the State of Israel with samely carefully-chosen plots deemed to make the best of the terroir.

Vitkin (Israel)

Asaf, Sharona and Doron in the vatroomMoshav Kvar, Vitkin
Vitkin is a small family winery making small-batch cuvées near Netanya, north of Tel Aviv, from vineyards located on the Carmel mountain slopes and in Ella valley in the Judean hills.
A convergence of destiny made the three people involved in this venture to enentually follow the winery life after other life experiences. Just think : the current winemaker Doron Belogolovsky was a marble and stone dealer in his former life. For his business, he travelled regularly to Italy, in particular to Verona for a couple of years, where he got used to, and learned to like, guess what ?, wine. This was the 1980s', wine was a commodity then virtually non-existent in Israel, speaking of quality or even of drinkable wines. His wife Sharona was an architect, and she happened to have a brother, Asaf, who went to the agricultural school with different side courses and who eventually studied winemaking. That was right at the time Doron's interest into wine increased a few notches, especially after one of his Italian marble-and-stone business partners brought him to a family winery there for a visit and tasting in the cellars. That was a revelation. This is how it all had its start. The family farm in moshav Kvar was the ideal place to begin, and they're still there today, 7 years after the winery formally opened (2002). Doron was the initiator and wine lover (not that the two others don't like wine I guess) turned winemaker, Asaf got the formal winemaking education, with internship abroad, in Bordeaux, California and Australia. And Sharona, after keeping her architect job for a while, joined when the business took pace.

Seahorse Winery (Israel)

Ze'ev Dunie in the cask cellarMoshav Bar Giora, Judean hills
The SeaHorse winery is located in moshav Bar Giyora. Seahorse is Suson Yam in hebrew, Suson meaning small horse and Yam, sea. We reach the moshav after driving along a very scenic road through the Judean hills [picture on left], a narrow canyon-like valley bordered with lots of trees and rocks.
The collective-farm community was founded by Yemenite jews in the 1950s'. Ze'eve Dunie, the man behind the Seahorse winery is one of these decisive actors who took part in the early years when small, qualitative wineries sprouted all over Israel.
When we arrived at the winery, a young family was leaving the winery after a visit. The Seahorse winery grounds are far from being neatly arranged and landscaped like some other more commercial wineries. There is no tasting room and the lot in front of the facility (a former chicken farm) is quite messy and grassy, but Ze'ev Dunie doesn't care too much about these secondary details. This man, who didn't enter the wine world through an enology school and wasn't backed by wealthy investors, fell for the Israeli wine while shooting a documentary about wine in Israel. He has studied film making in California in the 1970s' and worked for TV in New York, which led him to Israel for a story about wineries there. That's when he got the virus. A personality who follows his own intuitions and doesn't hesitate to go against the wine trends, he makes a wine range with cuvées that respond to names like Lennon, Camus or Antoine [de Saint Exupery] in homage to authors and artists that he admires.

Domaine du Castel (Judean hills, Israel)

Eytan Ben Zekan along the early Castel vineyardsRamat Raziel, Judean Hills
The Domaine du Castel winery is located on the Judean hills in the vicinity of Jerusalem. It sits in the Ramat Raziel moshav (collective farm) in the place of a former chicken farm. The moshav structure has evolved throught Israel from the one of a collective farm where co-residents follow a semi-independant life but still centered on commodity production to the one of a residential community. Ramat Raziel, as such a residential community, didn't see positively the setting up of a winery in their midst even though it was to become one of the best wineries of Israel. The Castel vineyard was planted in 1988 and the first wine from these first rows was made in 1992, at a time when outside of the Golan Heights winery which had been founded short time ago, there was not much good wine produced in Israel, the wine landscape being dominated by several long-established mass bottlers like Carmel and Binyamina. This 2-casks-only 1992 wine was bottled 3 years later and through a common friend, one of these bottles landed on the table of Sothesby's Serena Sutcliffe (head of Sothesby's international wine department) who was stunned by the outstanding quality of the wine. Eli Ben Zaken was heartened by this prestigious regognition and it helped make him the move to make wine on a larger scale. The wine production at Castel has been now around 100 000 bottles for a few years now. Eytan says that the size of this production may question for some their being still considered a "boutique" winery, to quote the name of this wave of new small wineries which sprouted all over Israel a few years ago. It's not clear if there should be a limit in terms of production to still be considered a boutique winery, but anyway, they consider themselves as a professional winery whilst keeping with the initial spirit of the early years.

Yatir Winery (Israel)

Eran Goldwasser, winemaker at YatirTel Arad, Southern Hebron Mountains (Israel)
The Yatir winery is outstanding in many regards among Israeli wineries. First by its location. Imagine one of the hottest regions of Israel : we are here in the south, these are the slopes of the Hebron mountains, nothing would have grown here a few dozen years ago, the landscape was rocky and extremely arid at the border of the Negev desert which lies further on the south. The Yatir forest is a wonder by itself, it is the biggest man-made forest in Israel, and the extreme climatic conditions in which it was planted make the whole enterprise quite admirable. Lots of research, thinking and human expertise allowed this, but the idea was fathered by a single man : Ben Gurion, the first Prime Minister of Israel, who is said to have mandated the scientists of the country to study the practibility of creating a man-made forest here to bring this area back to life. The scientists, according to the story, said that it was not feasible due to the extreme climate there and the aridity, but when Ben Gurion was reported their negative answer he just said something like "No problem, let's change the scientists", and he pursued his personnal dream against common wisdom with the help of the KKL-JNF Fund. The result is amazing, a diversity and a wild life that you can even see on day time when it's hot (when the sun rises it must be worth to see). The Yatir forest as a pilot program has been a model for other desert region across the world. See this State of Israel document [Pdf] about desertification : on the climate/soil map of Israel, Yatir forest lies in the semi-arid region in the south (near Be'er-Sheva) and gets very little rain while the Golan in the upper-right corner is described as a humid region. And the Yatir vineyards, the planting of which having commercially begun in 1996, are nestled in the middle of this huge forested area [click on the picture on left, the pale-green patch in the middle is the vineyard]. These vineyards are surrounded by wild life and take advantage of the altitude and the terroir to resuscitate the wineries that were covering the region 2500 years ago (see the 1st story of this post).

Margalit Winery (Israel)

Yair MargalitCaesarea, Israel
If there's someone who can be credited for starting the boutique winery movement, that's Yair Margalit. This scientist-trained, turned-winemaker/wine-lover created his winery in 1989, well before the other independant small wineries which sprouted all over Israel in the early 2000s'. We must remember that until the mid to late 1980s', Israel's wine landscape was quite uninteresting, there was basically only mass bottlers like Carmel around and virtually no small player or independant wineries set up by passionate individuals like the ones that came later.
Yair Margalit learned the trade in California and wrote his first winemaking book there in 1990, a book that is dubbed the bible of winemakers in Israel and helped many aspiring vintners to make the leap and start a winery. He has since published other books (bottom of the page) about winemaking, all with a scientific approach on the different stages of winemaking.
Chemist and physical-chemist by profession, he worked in research in Israel and started his interest in winemaking while in California when he was at UC Davis, studying chemistry unrelated to winemaking. The enology school at UC Davis was right near the chemistry department, he adds with a laugh, so he sneaked inside and from the 1st lecture he had there he fell in love with this field. So he took in one single year the full enology course which is usually stretched over 4 years (because you can study everything you want there, in parallel to your initial field). When he eventually came back home in israel he began making wine with his son who was very young then, crushing grapes with the feet.

Tzora (Judean Hills, Israel)

Eran Pick, the winemaker at TzoraKibbutz Tzora, Judean hills (Israel)
Ronnie James, the initiator of the winery venture at kibbutz Tzora played a very important role in the emergence of quality wineries in Israel. Initially an agronomist and a grower, he had spent 30 years growing grapes for purchasing wineries in the Sorek valley (Samson region). Making wine himself with the grapes he grew was a dream for him, but you may know that the original spirit of the kibbutz was rooted in a relatively austere version of socialism, even if human-sized and respective of the individual; wine was not really favorably considered by the idealistic kibbutzim then, it could even be considered as a bit decadent, and it was not among the utilitarian commodities that this type of economic entity was supposed to produce for the development of Israel. But Ronnie James kept pushing in this direction and eventually succeeded to overcome the reluctance of the kibbutz directorate. An other thing made a problem then, says Zeev : in the kibbutz egalitarian culture, everyone is supposed to hold every position and job at a time or another, rotating from the simplest tasks to the highest responsabilities, and that's just not possible in a winery, there's only one winemaker and you don't take the reins overnight unless you don't care about the quality of the wine.
Anyway, the winery was created at last in 1992 at Tzora (see the gate to the kibbutz on the right), some equipment was bought or borrowed here and there (just finding winery equipment was not easy at that time in Israel), and the first vintage yielded 1500 bottles in 1993. Kibbutz Tzora kept growing grapes for other wineries as it did before, but Ronnie James could at last makes wine there from part of the grape production, I would guess from the best of the grapes that Tzora grew, as along the years he had learned which plots and combination of varieties/terroirs yielded the best result. Ronnie James passed away last year in april, alas, and we couldn't ask him firsthand about his experience.

Saslove (Upper Galilee, Israel)

Barry Saslove in his Galilee facilityJish, upper Galilee (Israel)
We're somewhere in the upper Galilee and the GPS reads in hebrew something like "Road going to Nowhere" [picture on left]. The landscape is utterly beautiful and remote, and although I'm not very aware of the all the History-loaded regions in this country, there is definitely some palpable biblical feel around here. My request to the GPS people up in the sky : keep this place as road to nowhere on the small screen to ward the crowds off...
Reaching Barry Saslove's winery and vineyards near Jish, a christian-arab village in the Galilee highlands along the Lebanon border is a challenge and without my friend Zeev I doubt I'd had found the place.
Barry Saslove is one of these wine pioneers who came from a completely different field. Canadian born (from Ottawa, he says : I'm from the Canadian side, not the French side, laughing...), the very origin of his wine passion came by accident : in 1966 he was accepted in the school of Dental Medicine in Ottawa, but at the condition that he would improve his French (very important in bilingual Canada). For that, he had to go twice a week to the university at night for French courses, which he took as a punition until he saw his teacher : it was a beautiful French-French woman, young and blond and as he improved his French by talking with her, she opened the door to him on another cultural world where wine and foods held a prominent position : she introduced him about Beaujolais for example and Quebec being very close to Ottawa, he would drive over there and buy wine and recount in his next French class what he had. The beautiful French teacher moved on with Chateauneuf du Pape and he discovered the wines & foods of the Rhone. In his words, she epitomized what a French woman should be : sophisticated, beautiful, sexy and knowledgable in wines and food. She is the one who instilled the passion of wine in him and he carried it ever since... From that time on, he kept buying and collecting fine wines wherever he would travel, French Bordeaux being some of his favorite wines (he'll never refuse a good Sauternes).
He later became a computer programmer while giving on the side wine-education courses, and ultimately setting up his winery in kibbutz Eyal near Kfar Saba in the Sharon region in 1998. The boutique-winery scene was mostly empty then, you have to remember that most of these new, small-size wineries appeared in the early 2000s'. He opened since then this other facility in the upper-Galilee heights in Northern Israel, to make wines from grapes grown on high-altitude vineyards.

Pelter Winery (Golan, Israel)

Tal Pelter in the barrel room Golan Heights, Israel
We left Tel Aviv for the Golan very early on a sunday with Zeev, after I met him outside the train station of Bet Yeshua in the outskirts of Tel Aviv. As often in Israel, the train had its lot of young student-looking service men and women commuting to their base and wearing routinely and casually their weapon on the side or in their back. This is a common sight in this country and a surprising one for a west European but the Israeli society gives nonetheless to the visitor a feeling of security and confidence that we are far to feel in all neighborhoods of our home country, including in our public transportation system.
Israel is such a small country that you can visit different wine regions in the scope of several days and keep staying in Tel Aviv : you visit the northern highlands or the low-lying Negev desert during the day, and before the evening, you're back on the beach in Tel Aviv for a swim. Well, after the Golan we came back a bit late, but a swim would have still been an option. Our goal in the Golan was kibbutz Ein Zivan, for a visit at Pelter winery there. Ein Zivan kibbutz (its gate on the picture right) lies near the north-eastern border between the Golan and Syria (see this map of Golan featuring kibbutz and settlements), very close to the Syrian border in fact. The Golan heights is a high-altitude region which has been for ages (even when still under Syria rule) very sparsely inhabited, and where the conditions have been discovered recently as being optimal for grape growing, with cold nights and lots of sun like in the rest of the country.
Before landing here in 2005, Tal Pelter studied three years agriculture in Israel, then science at the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot(94-95) and then he went to western Australia to study viticulture & winemaking. He had his first degreee in Perth (4 years), finishing in 2001 and spent time in the Darlington Estate working with winemaker John Griffith. That's when he came back to Israel, to where he's originally from, moshav Zofit in center Israel, where he set up a small pilot winery to see if he could make something here. This 2002-2003 trial was positive, so he moved in 2004 to the Golan and settled in the kibbutz Ein Zivan, setting shop in a bland-looking warehouse inside the kibbutz.
He had no connection here but decided to come over here for the potential quality of grape growing. The kibbutz works like a settlement so he just joined with his family: his wife and three daughters aged 9, 6 and 1-1/2, plus a son on his way for august. He rents the facility from the kibbutz but plans to move out in the near future to have his own independance. He planted vineyards here on the Golan heights and 50-60 % of the grapes that he vinifies at the winery come from the Golan and for the rest of the grapes, 20 % come from Eme Kadesh (Kadesh valley) in Galilee and about 15 % of the grapes still come from the Jersusalem mountains where he started originally