I often refer to wine as “consumable organic art.” A good winemaker needs to be part viticulturist and biochemist to make sure nothing goes wrong with a wine, first with the grapes in the vineyard then with the juice fermenting into wine at the winery. As well, a winemaker needs to be part artist to use their sense of aesthetics and their craftsmanship to deliver something special from the grapes they have available the same way a sculptor might bring forward a piece of art from a slab of stone.
So, I mention this now because wineries can change wine makers from time to time especially wineries which are not family-owned. The better the wines have been traditionally the more noticeable the differences can be.
Such was the case in 2008 when Gil Shatsberg became the winemaker at the Recanati Winery replacing founding winemaker Lewis Pasco. Lewis made wines that most might consider bolder “New World” wines and Gil’s wines quickly appeared to be more nuanced “Old World” wines. It’s debatable if the wines got better or not because they were award-winning wines before the change and they remain so afterwards but it’s not debatable that the style changed. Yet this isn’t a story about the Recanati Winery although I enjoy writing about them and you can find previous articles, film and radio shows I’ve written about them on the internet and I plan to write more in the future. I mention the Recanati Winery leading to talking about recent changes at the smaller yet quite reputable Ella Valley Winery.
Ella Valley could be considered one of the most successful wineries in Israel. Their wines are well-respected and they seem adept at selling their bottles in Israel and overseas. In fact they have one of the highest ratios of exporting wine with about 40% of their wine leaving Israel which is about twice the national average and less typical of a winery making about 200,000 bottles of wine a year than larger wineries making millions of bottles.
Last year, Ella Valley changed wine makers. Israeli-born yet French trained Doron Rav Hon left the winery to pursue his own boutique project in Israel and I look forward to tasting those wines when he thinks his wines are ready. He didn’t leave without first welcoming and handing over the reins to Lynn Gold, a Russian-born immigrant to Israel who trained in Australia.
Although this is her first time in charge of a winery, she takes the helm of Ella Valley with more experience than many other wine makers in Israel who went on to do great things at other wineries. She worked three vintages in Australia, which has more climatically in common with Israeli vineyards than most French wine regions. In Israel, she worked at the commercial Tabor Winery in the Galilee and the revered boutique Chateau Golan in the Golan Heights.
So by now landing at Ella Valley in the Judean Hills, Lynn will be one of the blessed wine makers who’s been given the opportunity to grasp the potential of Israel’s three best wine regions. Time will tell how Lynn’s experience and innate talent translates into what kind of wines she makes at Ella Valley but even though Ella Valley may be too big to be considered a “boutique” winery anymore they do make what many might consider “boutique” wines. That is to say in Israel the term boutique tends to refer to wineries that make less than 10,000 cases a year but in California it has been used to refer to wineries that make less than 5,000 cases but regardless the wines Ella Valley makes tend to be only several thousand or even a few thousand of bottles of each wine instead of tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of each label which are more common of the top 12 producers in Israel who account for 94% of the country’s production.
So this early in her tenure with only one harvest under her belt, we don’t know too much what Ella Valley under Lynn Gold has to offer but the first taste is available in their 2011 Ella Valley Sauvignon Blanc, her first wine to be released. I got to taste it recently and it was distinctly different from that the previous vintage made by Doron. Doron’s 2010 was a lot lighter and more nuanced “Old World” Bordeaux style of Sauvignon Blanc while Lynn’s was more fruit forward and reminiscent of “New World” examples we might taste from Chile, New Zealand or California. I look forward to seeing how the reds differ over time.
When asked how she might be approaching winemaking differently than Doron, Lynn responded that she wasn’t consciously doing anything differently. She volunteered that she respected Doron’s winemaking and wasn’t planning on making any radical changes even though the owners have given her free rein on a lot of decisions yet that as two different people (and as a matter of aesthetics) they were bound to make different wines. Lynn’s 2011 Chardonnay and 2011 Rosé should be her next two releases but it will take a year or two where any reds that she’s crafted from crush to release are available. In the meantime, she has barrels of wine that Doron made that she will decide how to blend into final wines of the same varietal and as a support to other single varietal wines and their Ever Red blend.
Part of Ella Valley’s success is due to their choice of interesting varietals from proven to be enviable vineyards. They’ve been a leader at delivering good Pinot Noir and Cabernet Franc to supplement their Cabernet Sauvignon and Syrah and of note they’re one of the most prominent wineries to offer Merlot as their flagship red in contrast to Syrah, Cabernet Sauvignon or a red “Bordeaux” blend. With Malbec vineyards coming on-line soon and a new winemaker, fans of Ella Valley and Israeli wines can be cautiously optimistic as much as I am eager to see how their new wines will differ for better or worse or most likely they’ll be just as good but distinctly different.
