A BRIGHT OUTLOOK FOR ISRAEL

With a new focus on Rhône grapes and white wines, winemakers forge an exciting future for this emerging wine region

- KRISTEN BIELER

Eran Pick was working as a winemaker in Sonoma when a trip home to his native Israel and a visit to Tzora Vine-yards in the Judean Hills in 2006 changed his destiny. “Walking through the vineyard, you see it has hallmarks of the greatest vineyards in the world—shallow limestone soils, 60-million-year-old marine fossils, vines growing on rocks—and the Mediterranean, which you can see from the vineyards.”

Pick was hired on the spot by the late Ronnie James, who founded Tzora in 1993. Thus, like so many in Israel’s current generation of winemakers, Pick returned home after years of winemaking abroad armed with knowledge and perspective that has helped chart a new course for this both ancient and emerging region.

“I want to tell the story of a place, not a variety,” explains Pick, who trained at the University of California, Davis, and was Israel’s first Master of Wine (now joined by Barkan Winery’s Ido Lewinsohn). “A grape is a tool to tell the story of a region, and you need the right tool.”

He began to transition Tzora’s estate plantings to Rhône grapes, increasingly edging out the Bordeaux varieties that Israel’s modern wine industry was founded on. “Syrah is a very good variety in our climate; you can harvest when grapes aren’t extremely ripe and the tannins aren’t harsh,” which can sometimes be a problem for Cabernet in Israel, he explains.