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Sour Grapes?
Margo Lipschitz Sugarman
 BOTTLED UP: Blayer (right) invites vistors to sample the product. He and his 70 employees are working as if there were no uncertainties. |
In the area of its cellars set aside as a wine archive, the Golan Heights Winery�s 16 years of production are represented by 16 cabinets filled with bottles of cabernet sauvignon, merlot, chardonnay and other wines of each vintage. Winery director Shalom Blayer insists that three dozen or so empty cabinets, and many more besides, will fill up with samples of the vintages of years to come.
Despite the possibility of peace with Syria and an Israeli withdrawal, Blayer insists that it�s business as usual at the winery, which has played a major role in the upgrading of Israel into a producer of high-quality wines.
On this particular day, he�s showing a small group of visitors around the plant, located not far from Katzrin, the Golan�s principal town. After a tour of the archive, part of a magnificent new cellar inaugurated a few months ago, he takes them through a heavy wooden door to a large glass-walled room used for wine-tastings and lectures, whose centerpiece is a banquet-sized wooden table. On one side of the room, visitors look out into the cellar section, its moisture and temperature regulated by computerized thermostats and humidifiers, where barrel after barrel of wine is slowly being exposed to the benefits of aging in French oak. The view on the other side is of hundreds of bottles, neatly stacked in a darkened room for storage.
A little farther on, in the bottling area, Orthodox men - Jewish law requires that if wine is to be kosher it may be touched only by Jews who observe the Sabbath - are filling heavy glass bottles with a mix of wine and yeast that will eventually become Yarden sparkling wine.
What is the winery director�s take on the Shepherdstown goings on and the future of the region? "First and foremost, I live on the Golan," says Blayer, who moved to Kibbutz El Rom on the Heights - one of the seven settlements that own the winery - after his army service 30 years ago and now lives in Katzrin. "Only second am I a businessman. And I can�t draw a line between what�s going to happen to the business and what�s going to happen to the Golan."
Blayer acknowledges, reluctantly, that he thinks Israel will eventually turn the Golan over to Syria in a peace deal - and that the agreement will be approved in a referendum. "But I won�t say that if we lose the vote, we�ll go and build a winery in South America. That�s like saying it�s over. Nor can I tell our 70 workers that we�re planning something after the withdrawal and that everything they do in the interim is temporary. If I did that," he says, "they wouldn�t have any reason to wake up in the morning."
Still, he reports, the company is already building a second winery at Kibbutz Yiron, in the Galilee. Blayer insists that the four kibbutzim and three moshavim which own the winery - all but one of them, Ramot Naftali, located on the Golan - didn�t make the $4-million investment because of the looming withdrawal. "We had been thinking about building the additional facility before we knew there would be renewed negotiations with Syria. We just see this as another winery."
At first, he says, the new winery will be able to process only 1,000 tons of grapes a year, a sixth of the Katzrin plant�s current capacity. But he acknowledges that it can be increased over time, just as the capacity of the existing winery grew with the years. Already new vines have been planted in the Galilee, whose harvests will be processed at Yiron. But even though the same varieties will be grown in the Galilee, there�s no substitute for the grapes grown on the Golan Heights, he sighs.
"We could take this Katzrin winery and move it as is to the Galilee," says Blayer. The problem is replacing the vineyards. "The Golan vineyards aren�t very big, nothing like other wine-growing regions like Bordeaux in France, or the Napa Valley in California," he says. "And there�s little similarity, because it�s not homogenous. There�s a huge difference between the northern part of the Golan, which is 1,200 meters above sea level, with cold temperatures and snow, and the Katzrin area, which is only 400 meters above sea level and an average of 6-7�C (11-13�F) hotter. Those temperature differences," he explains, "allow us to grow several different varieties in different areas of the Golan: white chardonnay and sauvignon blanc, and red pinot noir, which need cold, and cabernet sauvignon, merlot and muscat, which require warmer weather." Bordeaux grows only three main varieties of red grapes -- cabernet franc, cabernet sauvignon and merlot -- on 250,000 acres of vineyard, while in the Golan the six main varieties are grown on only 1,950 acres. In addition to the special climate, the volcanic soil found locally only on the Golan provides drainage that�s ideal for grapevines.
Soil and climatic conditions were what induced 11 Golan farmers, who had previously been growing apples and pears, to start planting vineyards in the 1970s. The first harvests a few years later were marketed to established winemakers, including Carmel Mizrachi, Israel�s largest winery. But in the early 1980s, the kibbutzniks and moshavniks decided to go it alone. Crucially, says Blayer, they opted for quality, recruiting graduates of the University of California at Davis, the mecca of American wine technology, to set up the winery; purchasing the most sophisticated machinery from major wine centers; and acquiring European vines to be planted in the Golan soil. Perhaps most important of all, they began marketing Israeli wine as it had never been marketed before.
"Israeli wine had always been perceived as sacramental wine abroad," says Blayer, "and at home, in the army, we used to call it hammer wine. It was like being hit over the head with a hammer. After drinking it you would have to go to bed."
In 1983, the bottling line began to roll. "It was the first time Israel had manufactured a real table wine. As a result, the whole industry improved. Take a wine of Carmel Mizrachi today, and compare it to 10 years ago. There�s a huge difference," says Blayer, who joined the winery in 1998 as its head, after serving as director of the Israel Fruit Board. As a mark of that progress, Israeli wines have moved out of the kosher section, taking their place next to reds and whites from major wine countries like France, Italy, Chile, South Africa and Australia on the shelves of wine shops around the world.
"The vision was to build the best winery possible, not just something a little better than what existed at the time," says Adam Montefiore, the Golan winery�s international marketing manager. "Today we�re known as one of the leading high-tech wineries in the world," says Montefiore, comparing Israel favorably to "new" wine countries like Australia, South Africa and Chile. Yarden wines, the top of the Golan line, were the only ones from the entire Eastern Mediterranean named among the world�s 200 top at last year�s prestigious New York Wine Experience trade show. "The area that gave the world winemaking in Biblical times," bubbles Montefiore, "has now become a new quality wine region."
The Golan Heights Winery now sells 4 million bottles a year of its Yarden, Gamla and Golan labels and has seen a constant growth of 10 to 15 percent per year. Over the past few years, the company has invested $2.5 million annually in improvements - prior to the new cellar, these included new vats and other equipment to process the increasing input of grapes - and the moshav/kibbutz farmer-owners invest $1 million a year in the vineyards, adding a few hundred acres per year.
Sales last year were about $17 million, including $3 million in exports.
"We still can�t meet demand," notes Montefiore. "We don�t even have enough quality red wine to put in Israeli supermarkets." It�s this demand, he insists, that guarantees that the winery will continue to operate, somehow, somewhere. "Our cus-tomers wouldn�t allow us not to."
The thought of walking away from the Golan vineyards horrifies Montefiore, as it does his co-workers. "Vineyards are such a symbol of peace. Equating peace with tearing up vineyards isn�t peace at all." And he hopes someone will find a better solution than abandoning the grape-growing areas, at least. "You don�t need a flag to grow grapes," Montefiore says, expressing the hope that Barak takes the growers into consideration before he signs an agreement.
Indeed, suggests Blayer, "why not take the Hong Kong model [where British residents stayed on when China took over the crown colony] and let Syrian villagers come and live alongside us in the Golan?" He stiffly refuses to comment on other alternatives, from moving the plant and contracting to purchase grapes from the Syrians to leasing the winery from Syria.
Blayer says he still has the words of the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin ringing in his ears, and they are his watchword. He recalls that in 1995, when Rabin was talking with the Syrians, he met with him on the Golan. "Rabin told us then: �One day, when there�s a settlement with Syria, you won�t be where you are today. Meanwhile we have nothing, so go home and go to work.� That�s what he said and that�s what we did. And so far, that�s what we�re doing this time."
The Golan�s famed winemakers will go on working, indeed, even if they do have to shift their center of operations to the Galilee, bid farewell to the Golan�s unique vineyards, and label their wines with names that refer to land they no longer cultivate. But make no mistake: If a peace treaty sees the Golan returned to Syrian hands, they won�t be popping corks at the winery.
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