As Israeli wines win medal after medal in international competitions, their entry into the mainstream fine wine market is hardly news anymore.
And yet, says Gary Landsman, director of marketing for the importer Royal Wine Corp., Israeli wines are reaching new benchmarks.
“We’re seeing stylistic changes by winemakers in Israel,” said Landsman, who worked in Israeli wineries during the harvest seasons from 2006 to 2008. He’s not referring to the big switch from sweet Kiddush wine to sophisticated products that is already well entrenched, but something much more subtle.
“As recently as five years ago, some Israeli winemakers still preferred bombastic, robust, masculine styles, where they’re getting rich fruit extracts and using oak barrels to their fullest. Now we are starting to see winemakers temper their use of oak barrels and pare back a little on extraction so the wines are a bit more elegant.”
Another significant change has to do with the age of the vines. Although wine-making existed in the region thousands of years ago, the modern enterprise started from scratch after the founding of the state and in some ways is just now coming of age.
“The [wine-growing] grapevines in Israel are about 30 years old, and by worldwide standards that is young,” Landsman explained. “When wine is made from immature vineyards, that comes through in the taste — some of the younger vineyards have off-putting herbaceous flavors. Only now are some of the first Israeli winemakers, like Carmel, able to offer ‘old vine’ wines.”
Carmel’s Appellation label, for example, can be found on old vine wines such as its Shomron Carignan 2004, made from Carignan grapes growing in the winery’s nearly 35-year-old vineyards in Zichron Ya’acov. Carmel is one of the older wineries in Israel, founded in 1882 by Baron Edmond de Rothschild.
Wine critic Daniel Rogov gave Binyamina Winery’s Old Vine Cabernet Sauvignon 2007 a score of 94 out of 100, and wrote: “A limited edition, showing dark, almost impenetrable garnet with just a hint of royal purple at the rim. Full-bodied, with generous but remarkably round tannins and gentle notes of spicy wood. On the nose red fruits, vanilla and a hint of cinnamon. …Elegance on the grand scale.”
Alongside the maturing of the vineyards, he said, Israel’s winemakers have learned which grape varieties work best.
“The wine industry in Israel started with French varietals, such as merlot and chardonnay, but now we’re discovering that Israel’s soil may not be best for those,” said Landsman. “There’s a lot of experimentation now with varietals suited to the eastern Mediterranean climate of Israel. … This is leading to better and more distinctively Israeli wines.”
All these developments represent a rich opportunity to introduce the general wine-buying consumer to Israeli wines.
To that end, Royal recently started the Israeli Wine Producers Association, an initiative to help Israeli wines gain greater acceptance. “You’re finding more and more people getting over the impression that Israeli wine equals kosher equals Kiddush-sweet equals ‘why bother?’ We’re working diligently to break that stigma,” said Landsman.
The IWPA’s ads promote the message that buying Israeli wine is no different than buying from other new world wine countries like Chile and Argentina, and that kosher certification isn’t an indication of inferiority, as evidenced by the kosher symbol on iconic products such as Snapple and Coke.
Not that all Israeli wines are kosher, although increasing numbers of Israel’s dozens of boutique wineries are starting to go kosher to increase their appeal to the important overseas Jewish consumer.
“My goal is to inform the wine drinkers of the United States that Israel is on the map for wine,” said Joshua Greenstein of the IWPA. The tagline he likes to use is “Ancient land, modern wine.”