Saslove (Upper Galilee, Israel)

Barry Saslove in his Galilee facilityJish, upper Galilee (Israel)
We're somewhere in the upper Galilee and the GPS reads in hebrew something like "Road going to Nowhere" [picture on left]. The landscape is utterly beautiful and remote, and although I'm not very aware of all the History-loaded regions in this country, there is definitely some palpable biblical feel around here. My request to the GPS people up in the sky : keep this place as road to nowhere on the small screen to ward the crowds off...
Reaching Barry Saslove's winery and vineyards near Jish, a christian-arab village in the Galilee highlands along the Lebanon border is a challenge and without my friend Zeev I doubt I'd had found the place.
Barry Saslove is one of these wine pioneers who came from a completely different field. Canadian born (from Ottawa, he says : I'm from the Canadian side, not the French side, laughing...), the very origin of his wine passion came by accident : in 1966 he was accepted in the school of Dental Medicine in Ottawa, but at the condition that he would improve his French (very important in bilingual Canada). For that, he had to go twice a week to the university at night for French courses, which he took as a punition until he saw his teacher : it was a beautiful French-French woman, young and blond and as he improved his French by talking with her, she opened the door to him on another cultural world where wine and foods held a prominent position : she introduced him about Beaujolais for example and Quebec being very close to Ottawa, he would drive over there and buy wine and recount in his next French class what he had. The beautiful French teacher moved on with Chateauneuf du Pape and he discovered the wines & foods of the Rhone. In his words, she epitomized what a French woman should be : sophisticated, beautiful, sexy and knowledgable in wines and food. She is the one who instilled the passion of wine in him and he carried it ever since... From that time on, he kept buying and collecting fine wines wherever he would travel, French Bordeaux being some of his favorite wines (he'll never refuse a good Sauternes).
He later became a computer programmer while giving on the side wine-education courses, and ultimately setting up his winery in kibbutz Eyal near Kfar Saba in the Sharon region in 1998. The boutique-winery scene was mostly empty then, you have to remember that most of these new, small-size wineries appeared in the early 2000s'. He opened since then this other facility in the upper-Galilee heights in Northern Israel, to make wines from grapes grown on high-altitude vineyards.

Barry Saslove in a scenic Galilee setting close to his vineyardsBarry Saslove never became a dentist but eventually found his way in the computer field. He first came to Israel as a volunteer in 1967 for the 6-day war then went back regularly to Canada and California. He was fortunate that during the last years of his job with computers he was sent to San Francisco and that's when the nights became more important than the days, he says : he was dealing with computers in the daytime, earning money, and learning in evening courses about wine with people who were passionate professionnals knowledgeable about the wines of the world. Of course they went also in California wineries and he stayed there, learning to understand the American taste and how it evolved. It was between 1988 and 1991 and Americans were just beginning. They didn't understand the fruit and its complexity then, but they did understand the barrel, it talked to them. The very early American wines at the beginning of the American wine revolution were very heavy on the wood. And over the years the wood has been going down and they are making more refined wines in his opinion and it shows the evolution of the people. When he came back to Israel he saw the same sort of evolution taking place there. Israel also is witnessing a Renaissance of the wine culture and at the beginning people have been loving the influence of the wood, but it is starting to change also here toward a better understanding of the fruit of the wine. When he came back to Israel in 1991 he was ready to quit from his computer job or to be fired to be able to start a new life in wine. Either solution didn't show up so he wrote his first book in 1992. At the end he was still paid by the Amdocs, the computer company but he would mostly be working on his wine projects, teaching courses and writing books...Barry Saslove in his Galilee vineyardAfter teaching and writing for some time, he remembered a wise sentence written on the door of his teachers back at the University : those who can, do; those who can't, teach, so he started doing, making wine at last in 1993... He bought grapes and a baby crusher, the ones they make for home vintners, small and cute but doing a good job. He thinks he was lucky somehow. He made around 1000 bottles that year that he gave away or drank with friends. It was red Cabernet. He says that he hadn't a clue of what he was doing, he was just going through it but it was OK. In 1994 he got barrels and made about 4000 bottles, beginning to be more commercial about his bottles, to test the market, sort of. He realized in 1994 that there was really a thirst for wines in Israel, the only good winery then was the Golan Heights winery. At that time people didn't even know about Yaïr Margalit who was to be another well-known pioneer in Israel and who played the role of a catalyst. And Carmel was out of the game in regard of good wines of course. There was this early boutique winery, he says, Meron winery, which closed down since. There was also Tishbi which started very small then, and which was the second boutique winery, with Yaïr Margalit as guiding winemaker. The third winery to pop up in Israel was Tzora, in kibbutz Tzora, with Ronnie James as the inspirator.Saslove vineyard in the upper GalileeKibbutz Eyal in central Istrael is where he keeps his offices and also the finished products, but the region is not suited for grape growing. He grows grapes over there in Northern Israel, in the upper Galilee. he first planted over there in 1998 and he bought grapes too, from Kerem Benzimrah, a beautiful terroir not far from here, the Romanée Conti of Israel's terroirs. Now he leases land and comes with an agreement with the owner, paying a rent for the surface, but he and Ido Aviani do all the farming. Overall, he makes wine out of a 13-14-hectare surface split on 5 different locations. The soil here is very volcanic, with all these brown debris, and there is red earth too. The region has lots of traditionnal cattle, plus also semi-wild horses, deers, birds and other wildlife. Speaking of wildlife, they have fences around the vineyard plots, planted deep into the ground to prevent wild boars from forcing it. It is located right near (a bit higher on the slope) one of Margalit winery vineyards. Margalit's plot has no grass on it, he used weedkillers to get rid of it. Saslove's vineyard is full of high grass all over. The vines are 11 years old or so here. This is Cabernet, which in Israel always mean Cabernet Sauvignon (other wise we say Cabernet Franc). There is also a Merlot plot right along the Cabernet. The whole vineyard is surrounded by low-lying stones as if they had all been taken out of the plot's ground along the ages. They bring some compost every year to help the vines. Speaking of the grass, they sometimes cut it by a hand mower. All sort of weeds grow here, legumes (good for the nitrogen), cereals also (which are good for the biomass).Vineyard manager Ido Aviani checking the bottom of the vines This particular vineyard is a 2,2-hectare plot sitting on a gentle slope, surrounded by a fence. On both sides and toward the summit of the hill, this is the guarrigue, and Margalit's vineyard lies on the slope below. Ido Aviani is the agronomist in charge of the vineyard. He had his first degree in Israel and completed it by an 8-month internship in an organicly-farmed estate in Sonoma, Coturi, a small winery making 40 000 bottles or so. The guy there was making wines in very small volumes with nothing added, no industrial yeats, no SO2. Ido explains how the weeds work to help the vineyard and improves the soil; kneeling down, he shows the decomposed remains of last year's grass and weeds that melts into the ground. He says that the weather, it's hard to influence, but the soil and living conditions of the vines, they can.There's an organic certification in Israel too, but they didn't join yet, they may consider in the future because people want to know. Barry Saslove says that with organic rules, they are obliged to use sulphur a special way, it can't be a sulphur salt and you have to mix water with SO2 gaz, a very complicated process needing the use of protective cloth, worse, he says, than an orthodox-jewish thing, so he gave up until now. Ido Aviani says that there's a lot of fashion in the way "organic farming" is being labelled on wines, and at Saslove they're wary of fashions. They started 8 years ago with this organic farming, but their goal was to make better wines, not follow a trend. Here and there on the vines, there are some pheromones to confuse the pests. When they cut the canes in winter, they crush them and give the grinded vegetal back to the ground.They irrigate very little, and it's enough for the summer.
About the population living in the communities around, Ido says that it is very diverse : arabs, some being muslims some christians, some Druze, some Tcherkassy too, all concentrated in this small region. Driving back from the vineyards to the winery, we pass a Druze village, Horfesh (see this interesting page about this beautiful remote village). This place was pounded by Hezbollah missile strikes during the 2006 war. The Druze of the region also do their service years in the IDF, the Israeli armed forces. Tasting with Barry SasloveWe walk into the winery, with double-jacket stainless-steel vats along the walls and a few barrels. The vats are made either in Israel or Italy. The fact that wineries are sprouting in Israel translated into Israeli companies manufacturing winery tools, like here for these Regev vats. He has some 160 barrels altogether now. He stores some here in Moshav Tsuriel and other in kibbutz Eyal, his other place in central Israel. This is a modern winery. He uses good toys, he says, the new crusher and also the press, both made by Bucher. Barry Saslove doesn't believe in single-vineyard wines, but he prefers blends that express best what he wants to make.
Let's taste some wine, we do that in a room located like a mezzanine over the vatroom in the back.
__Saslove, Reserve 2005, 2000 bottles or 7 barrels of it. Bottle opened two hours ago before lunch and the vineyard visit. This wine, he says, is the most typical regarding the style of wines that he makes. He makes three ranges of wines : the Aviv serie, the Adom, and the Reserve. He doesn't consider that his has some vineyards that are somehow inferior, they're just different from each other. Here, what we taste is Cabernet 100% but coming from different vineyards, the one we saw today and a couple of others, including the one on Kerem Benzimra. Aromas of chocolate, jammy fruits, nice fruit. Well-integrated tannins. He doesn't do Reserve wine every year, in 2001 he didn't make any. What he looks in his wines is the fruit and also the length. 2005 he says, is not his best vintage so long, the 2004 was much better and 2006 too. But 2006 has just been bottled and he hasn't any here. It stayed between 20 & 22 months in barrels.
The Reserve is made from his very very best Adom barrels. He tastes the wines from all the barrels and he puts aside the best ones, the Reserve are not wines by design while the Adom are. Speaking of the Adom and the Aviv wines, the difference between them is, Adom wines are aged in barrels and he releases them in no less than 2 years.The Aviv wines haven't seen any barrels, they've had wood chips added. He says that he likes the use of wood chips, he can work on the wine very nicely with them. Zeev says that the Aviv wines have a light wood feel, not a heavy one. He uses two different cooperages and buys them several kinds of wood, he likes that and doesn't understand why the OIV in France doesn't allow the use of wood chips. He has been using chips for 11 years for his Aviv wines and he realized that for example the chips are not a cheap way of making a barrel-aged wine. The barrel gives its own character to the wine, the wood chips give something completely different but nonetheless interesting. The chips give more flexibility, he can use several types of wood quality at the same time, it is easier to handle. He uses them on a shorter time, but still, long enough : 6 months. He puts them in bags, very big "tea bags" in the stainless-steel vats. He moves them every now and then to get the flavors out. The surface in contact with the chips is larger and it gets a bigger impact on the wine. He uses chips but no micro-ox, he jokes that he is not Michel Rolland. Drifting to Parker who loves the Rolland-style wines, he says that he doesn't follow the Parker recipes for wines but Parker nonetheless gave a respectable note to his wine if not the highest 2 years ago : 88. He doesn't really give too much credit to wine critics, including to Robert Parker who is followed too blindly by the consumers. Barry Saslove drifts to another critic he considers exceptionnal, with the sharpest wine memory around, Jancis Robinson. There's also another British woman critic that he likes (he doesn't find her name), and Michael Broadbent who begins to get old now.
I'll put notes later on a Saslove Aviv that I bought in Tel Aviv (we didn't taste any other wine that day). He doesn't make any white wines. He made some (Sauvignon Blanc) when he was in New Zealand 2 years ago. The only Chardonnay that he likes is Chablis because he wants to taste the minerals, the pure wine, not the barrels and not the malolactic. If you make a good Chard, and it's not easy he says, you must not hide it behind the wood. I am the way...(another biblical-looking scene)Saslove wineryOffice at kibbutz Eyalphone + 972 (0)9 7492697Saslove/Galilee winery phone : + 972 (0)50 8530035info [at] saslove [dot] comwww.saslove.com

Comments

[Wolfgang Lehmann]

Why didn't you stop by at our Berlin vineyard or come and see our kosher German wine production in Erbach and Schwabenheim?!
See you next time around.
Wolfgang Lehmann