The Wall Street Journal published a profile about wine in the Judean Hills, near Jerusalem, in March 2010.
Tzora Vineyards
The vineyard of kibbutz-based Tzora.
Winemaker Yaakov Berg has a recycled winery under his land. Hewn out of stone in the days of Jerusalem’s Second Holy Temple, it holds an ancient wine press now flanked by oak barrels in which Mr. Berg’s best wines are aging. Above ground stands the home vineyard of his Psagot Winery—a player in an unexpected wine reawakening, after a slumber since biblical times, as the Judean Hills become an Israeli wine region to reckon with.
The 32-year-old Mr. Berg lives with his wife and two sons a few steps from this vineyard in a converted rail freight car, in the Israeli settlement of Psagot on the West Bank. During a visit to his vineyard among the stony hills near Ramallah, a muezzin’s call to prayer sounded from a nearby minaret—a stark reminder of the struggle over this land, to which Mr. Berg believes he is rooted through wine.
Psagot winery’s Yaakov Berg in the barrel room.
The wine he makes, also called Psagot, is very good indeed: dark-fruited and dense yet sleek in texture. Its West Bank origins also make it a controversial wine for some consumers and winemakers —an issue underlined by recent tensions over Israel’s announcement of new housing construction in East Jerusalem.
Surrounding Jerusalem at altitudes of up to 3,000 feet, the region has grown from a handful of boutique wineries in the late 1990s to nearly 30 today. Most are within Israel itself, dotting the gentle hills and valleys west and south of Jerusalem, although some start-ups, like Psagot, are on land occupied by Israel in 1967 during the Six-Day War.
Not long ago, it was assumed that Israel’s best wines were destined to come from the Northern Galilee, where the Golan Heights Winery jump-started the modern era of Israeli winemaking with its 1984 vintage. Overall, the Golan Heights winery continues to produce Israel’s greatest array of fine red and white wines, and numerous others in Northern Israel have joined it.
Some of the best known wineries in the Judean Hills.
Jack Molloy
But the Judean Hills region has been coming on strong. Ranking the country’s top 10 wineries, Israeli wine critic Daniel Rogov awarded four of the first six spots to Judean Hills wineries. Strikingly, the average age of this quartet is under 15 years.
Summer temperatures heat up the Judean Hills, but the nights cool off quickly, allowing grapes to develop flavors that translate into wines that taste anything but baked. “Unlike the Golan Heights, which has a more continental climate, we get a breeze from the sea even on the hottest days,” says Eli Ben Zacken, whose Domaine du Castel put the Judean Hills on the Israel wine map with its first vintage in 1992. “And the nights are refreshed by lots of dew. It drips off the grapes in the morning. By 9 a.m., they’re totally dry with humidity at around 35%.”
While the Judean Hills lack the volcanic soils that lend flavor impact to wines in the Golan Heights, the region’s complex soils do seem to contribute to complex wines. Cool air, too, slides down the hillsides to merge, here and there, with warm air from the coastal plain, causing a rarity in Israel: mist, which also moderates temperatures. Tzora, a kibbutz-based winery at the base of the Judean Hills that has pioneered in identifying vineyard particularities, makes a mineral-inflected Bordeaux-style blend from just such a vineyard called “Misty Hills,” a ringer for a cool-climate wine.
European Pressphoto Agency
In biblical Israel, the Judean Hills were a hotbed of winemaking—and drinking. “Archeologists have found a winery in almost every second house around here,” says Ben Ami Bravdo, a viticulturist at Hebrew University and a Judean Hills winemaker. Based on those findings, Mr. Bravdo estimates, Jews in the days of the second temple, destroyed in 70 A.D., were annually consuming “300 liters per capita” compared to around four liters in modern Israel. Back then, much wine was dedicated to religious ritual, including animal sacrifice at Jerusalem’s Holy Temple.
At his vineyard, Mr. Berg showed me the ancient press he’d discovered when his tractor sunk into mud as he prepared the vineyard seven years ago. A stairway into the earth led to a heavy steel door. In contrast to the warm, dry afternoon, the ancient, stone-hewn winery felt cool and damp, and dark fungus covered the walls. Strands of roots from the Syrah vines above us hung from the ceiling, having snaked their way through cracks in the stone, giving the chamber a spectral look.
The region remained out of the running as a quality wine producer until the early 1990s when Mr. Ben Zacken, then a Jerusalem restaurateur, began making home-grown wine on a pine-forested hillside west of the city. “That little plot next to my house was really the first vineyard of the modern era in the Judean Hills,” he says. A bottle of his first red wine, Domaine du Castel 1992, found its way into the hands of the London-based head of Sotheby’s wine department, Serena Sutcliffe. Finding none of the “cooked” and “herbaceous” flavors she’d found “prevalent” in Israeli reds, she called the Castel red “a real tour de force, brilliantly made and very ‘classic.’”
That praise gave the Egyptian-born Mr. Ben Zacken the courage to embark on winemaking full time. The red blends and Burgundian-style Chardonnay coming out of Castel’s handsome cellar are labeled “Haute Judée” (“Upper Judea”). They are “haute” in price as well ($60 for the Grand Vin 2006) and, until very recently, were the most expensive in the region.
A group of ambitious young wineries is now challenging Castel for the Judean Hills crown. Yatir, an outrider set in a national forest behind a Bedouin village at the southern edge of the region, has become even pricier than Castel: $70 for the current 2006 Yatir Forest. Older vintages have even crossed the $100 mark.
The wines, crafted by Australian-trained winemaker Eran Goldwasser, are emblematic of the emerging Judean style: herbal and nuanced with a sneaky way of taking charge of your palate. Yatir’s home vineyard stands at an elevation of 3,000 feet, yet it’s just half an hour from the Dead Sea, the lowest point on earth.
Also fetching top prices is Clos de Gat, a decade-old winery bordering the Ayalon Valley, where Joshua is said to have defeated the Five Kings. Clos de Gat’s reds and whites have big yet precise flavors. The key, says winemaker Eyal Rotem, is “keeping yields very small.” Besides Psagot, a bevy of other, lower-priced Judean Hills wines nip at the heels of the top tier, including Agur, Bravdo, Ella Valley, Flam, Sea Horse, Tzora, Tzuba. All can be bought online in the U.S.
While most of the Judean Hills wines are kosher, the rabbinical seal, once prominent on the front label of most wines, has been relegated to the back labels. That’s a sign of producer confidence that their wines are being purchased first for quality, not for being kosher.
One exception is Mr. Rotem of Clos de Gat wines, whose wines have been scored high by Robert Parker’s Wine Advocate and Wine Spectator magazine. Even though “kosherizing” his wines would broaden their market, the avowedly secular Mr. Rotem refuses to take that step, which would require rabbinical oversight of all winery practices. When I asked Mr. Rotem which other Judean Hills wines he favors, he shook his head and said, “I really can’t answer you since most of the others are kosher, and I won’t taste kosher wines.” That’s too bad. As ever more worthy bottlings come out of the Judean Hills, he’s missing a lot of good wine.
— Peter Hellman contributes to the Wine Spectator.
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