As Israeli wines continue to win international awards and recognition, Israeli wineries have found new ways to stress and market quality over quantity. Even though the largest wineries have taken similar steps to improve their wines every year, often the way they bring these wines to market differ. The Carmel, Yarden and Tishbi wineries have all offered single vineyard wines that emphasize that these wines come from their best vineyards out of the dozens if not hundreds they have to pick from. The Tabor winery has wines from different soils. The Barkan Winery has their Altitude series which offers three Cabernet Sauvignon wines from three different altitude vineyards.
One of the newest and most unique and demonstrative ways to market quality over quantity wines is the Yogev series from the Binyamina Winery. Yogev, Hebrew for farmer, is an attempt to give Binyamina’s growers for specific wines their due. One of the ways most commercial wineries improved quality over the last 10 years was to stop paying all growers by tonnage of grapes delivered but rather to pay them based on maintaining their plots by winery standards often regardless of yield. As yields decrease the intention is for vines to concentrate flavors, aromas and tannins into fewer more precious grapes. By older paying by the tonnage standards this would penalize the growers for producing better but fewer grapes. This bulk practice still is used for the lowest series of wines by many wineries but has all but been abandoned for their mid range and higher end wines.
To emphasize how important vineyard practices are to making good wine, there’s a adage on point. “You can make bad wine from good grapes but you can’t make good wine from bad grapes”. The point being is that like a chef, a winemaker’s final product is often determined by the base ingredients. In fact, one of Binyamina’s two winemakers, Assaf Paz was a pastry chef before he evolved into one of Israel’s more recognizabe and respected winemakers. One of Assaf’s main roles at Binyamina is to supervise vineyard practices to make sure growers are following the prescribed methods to deliver the grapes Binyamina wants to make better wines. Throughout the growing and harvesting seasons, Assaf can be found as often if not more frequently literally working in the field rather than the winery.
In fact, many of the best winemakers I’ve met over the years see themselves as sort of midwives for good grapes. The point being is that for these winemakers, it’s their mission to deliver the grapes into demonstrating themselves as the best wine possible displaying what the vineyards with as little manipulation as possible in the winery. From these winemakers, they frequently and modestly assert that “anywhere from 80% to 95% of what makes a good wine good or even great happens in the vineyard.”
Currently, there are seven wines being bottled by Binyamina under the Yogev label, four red, two whites and a rose. The reds are all Cabernet Sauvignon driven. There is a single varietal Cabernet Sauvignon, the only single varietal wine in the series. Two of the other reds are 50/50 blends of Cabernet Sauvignon/Shiraz (what I would call an “Australian or New World” blend and Cabernet/Merlot (“Old World or Bordeaux blend”). The remaining red is an 80/20 blend of Cabernet Sauvignon and Petit Verdot, two popular blending partners in Israeli red wines also based on traditional Bordeaux blends. The rose is a Malbec/ Carignan blend. It’s a dry rose as many roses as many higher-end roses distance themselves from the often disdained white zinfandel semi-dry wines of yesteryear. The two whites are a 70/30 dry unoaked Sauvingnon Blanc/ Chardonnay blend and their 45/40/15 semi-dry blend of “aromatic” French Colombard, Gewurztraminer and Muscat Alexandroni respectfully. The reds were all oak aged in older barrels so that the growers’ fruit could be the star of each wine.
As the Yogev series is the only series of wine from a large Israeli producer to mention the vineyards and growers on the back of each bottle, the growers have the additional compensation of pride to motivate them to deliver the best possible grapes for harvest. The Binyamina Winery also should take pride as the share the credit for delivering these affordable yet desirable wines to the marketplace.
