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| Syrah Grapes at Chateau Golan |
Tuesday was a day to get organized, arrange some of our visits for Wednesday and for me to use my public transportation skills (more or less) to get to Herzliya to meet Yossi. I met my friend Shlomi Zadok for Lunch at Ryo, an asian restaurant on Emek Refayim. The food was a bit sweet for my taste - I had the wings and something like Sesame Chicken and it was good and it was a huge portion. Shlomi helped me avoid a city bus and took me to the central bus station. From there is was direct to the Tel Aviv train station, and then a sheirut (a private minibus system without formal stops or schedule, but very organizied if you live here long enough and very reasonably priced) to Hezliya. I got to Yossi's office, checked out an excellent local wine shop to get an idea of pricing, and then enjoyed the air conditioning of Yossi's conference room to make calls and reservations for our trip to the North.
After work, we went to Yossi's mom's to go see the apartment that I will stay in for Daniel's Bar Mitzvah next week (a long story) and do some tidying up, but it was in fine shape. Inge fed us a lovely dinner and we slept over to get a jump on our travels the next morning. We had some business of Yossi's to take care of early in Binyamina, and then we were on our way to the north with our young padawan, Daniel Yossi's son).
The ride through the wadi Ara, Jezreel and Hula Valleys in breathtaking, and heading up to the Golan even more so. Much of the Golan Heights, once you get up there, is a broad, mostly volcanic plateau; very fertile and very beautiful. My phone beeped on the way up to tell me my coverage had switched to a Jordanian cell; it switched back when we got to the top, but we drove right along the border. Our first stop, in the village of Eliad was Chateau Golan. This is a well-established beautiful winery with a well-trained and friendly staff (we didn't meet the winemaker). They've been making wine for about 12 years. We tasted 3 wines, their Geshem Lavan made from Rousane (I hadn't heard of it either) and viognier - it's pricey but was very pleasant, a very jammy Syrah 2008 and a very soft, fruity merlot from 2008. The staff suggested we seek out a boutique winery 2 villages over, in Bnei Yehuda.
We stumbled around Bnai Yehuda (signage not a strong point in Israel generally and in small villages particularly - with a beautiful exception from Thursday which I'll describe later) and found a farm without many people around, and then a truck drove up and it just happened to be the winemaker from Ein Te'ana - we didn't taste anything, and he's in the process of moving his winery (though the smell of chicken dung would affect my ability to taste the wines) but Yossi bought a bottle with a guarantee that if he didn't like it, he could send back the empty and the winemaker would return his money. He was a nice guy (I'll have to get his name from Yossi - I don't remember it and I didn't write it down).
Part of Yossi's goal of this trip was to pinpoint the locations of many of the small wineries for which addresses and signage are not easily available, either because agricultural villages lack street signs or addresses (people may have P O Boxes in the village office) so Yossi was using his phone to collect GPS coordinates for the wineries so the entries on his Google Maps Wine Map http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?msid=207503047390820528301.0004917f92da88ea06082&msa=0&ll=31.863563,34.953003&spn=2.831641,4.938354
would be accurate. He is performing a great service to the country and the wine industry for no gain except his satisfaction that maybe it will be easier for more people to visit and support more wineries.
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| Steve At Bazelet HaGolan |
Next we went to the village of Kidmat Tzvi - I think there are 4 or 5 wineries there and we visited 3 - The largest is Bazelet HaGolan - they make about 100,000 bottles a year, have kashrut supervision and make some fine wines. They have a lovely tasting room and nice staff. We tasted 3 wines there - a fabulous 2009 Cabernet that I think will be great in about 2 years but its drinkable now, if a bit young, a nice merlot (I'm not a huge Merlot drinker) and a very pleasant chardonnay, not too heavy on the oak (8 months in the barrel and a nice citrusy flavor. We then spent about an hour with Ram Ilok at the Ram Winery - a one-man outfit who grows his own grapes and makes his own wine, about 10,000 bottles a year, mostly sold locally. Most of the winemakers we met on this trip studied winemaking in a course at Tel Chai. I thought Ram's wines were very good (in truth, we didn't taste a bad wine in 3 days). I thought his Cab-Shiraz blend was excellent and his Shiraz 2010 that we barrel tasted was extraordinary. I have no idea how I will ever get any, though.
Next we found Asaf Kedem whose winery is now called Asaf because Kedem wines in the US threatened to sue him, even though his name is Kedem. He was the original winemaker at Bazelet Hagolan (not so unusual in winemaking for their to be splits and offshoots). Asaf makes about 7 or 8 wines. We tasted a delicious Sauvignon Blanc with a lot of grapefruit and passionfruit flavors, a dry rose made from zinfandel (which is pretty unusual in Israel), his 2009 Cabernet Shiraz which is a 50/50 blend (I bought one) a Pinotage, a Syrah and a Cabernet Franc. His wines don't have kashrut supervision, they are excellent, and he makes about 60,000-80,000 bottles a year and pretty much sells it all.
At this point it was pretty late in the afternoon, around 5 I think. We stopped for lunch/dinner and realized we wouldn't make it to Har Odem, a winery I wanted to get to but didn't. We decided to see if we could find Pelter at Kibbutz Ein Zivan, at the very least to get GPS coordinates, and with the thought of maybe returning on Thursday.
We got the to kibbutz, and found another winery and a chocolate shop (both closed) but we learned from someone that Pelter was "around the back of the building". We walked around - there was absolutely no signage, and we saw a guy driving a forklift. We asked if he knew where Pelter was and he said "I'm Pelter". We introduced ourselves to Tal, told him what we were doing and he graciously invited us inside. He spent about an hour with us, I can't find my page of notes, so I have no idea what we tasted, but as I said, we didn't have a bad wine all day. We detained him long enough, he refused to sell us wine, said we can get it in shops (which is true - he makes about 100,000 bottles a year - it is very good and very available).
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