Hevron Heights winery (Israel)

Michel Murciano near a super-soft wine pump Kiryat Arba, Hebron (Israel)
You may not have heard much about this winery but is is quietly yielding some of the best Israeli wines with little fanfare. The Frenchman and Morocco-born Michel Murciano started this venture with several other French investors with the aim of producing first-class old-world wines, and their wines were spotted by a couple of critics in specialized tasting events abroad. The winery is located in a very ancient agricultural region, and the 31 km road (19 miles) between Jerusalem and Hebron winds through a very scenic and hilly landscape (see picture on right) with a patch geometry of small terraces and tiny walled fields dotted here and there with large houses, whith grapes, fruit trees and other crops being grown on a still very artisanal way by local arabs. Many of these walls may have already been in place in the biblical times I guess. The region is also known for its shaky inter-religious relations, with strong views about who-should-or-should-not-be-allowed-to-live-there expressing themselves sometimes by other means than words.
There has always been grapes grown in the area going back several millenium, just that for a few centuries the only allowed varieties were table grapes. The Hevron Heights winery which represents today a timid rebirth of this ancient wine region should be taken into account for the qualty of its wines as they are undoubtly among the best of the country.

Table-grape varieties growing just outside Hebron One of the first suprise when you reach Hebron is the extent of vine growing. Most of course are table grape varieties as the area is overwhelmingly muslim. Because of the excellent properties of the soil, of the optimal high altitude (about 1000 meters) with cool nights and the breeze, these table grapes are considered the best in the country. When jews started again to make sacramental wine in the early 19th century they used the table grapes grown near Hebron and Jerusalem, one of the varieties being named by the way Hebroni. You can read in this research document on grape vines published by the Hebron University that Grapevines are considered the second important fruit crop after olive in terms of both areas covered as well as economic returns in Palestinian [territories]. Due to the unique geographical and ecological environment for growing high quality table grapes, its growing and production are still restricted to the southern part of West-Bank especially Hebron and Bethlehem areas (MOA, 1998; 1999). According to the recent statistics, the total agricultural area of 170.000 ha, includes 105.000 ha planted with fruit trees, of which 8.900 ha are grown to grapevines cultivation (PCBS, 2004).
Like you may see on the picture above, the vines are trained high with a maze of wires holding horizontally the branches and foliage so that the grapes will hang underneath in the shadow. One of the cask cellars Michel Murciano, whom I met a couple of times in Paris at wine tastings, has been setting up this winery in 2000 with the backing of several French investors intended to revive the long wine history of the area. While we drive from Jerusalem to Hebron, Michel Murciano tells me that vines have been grown in this area for 6000 years and that this is undoubtly the best terroir for vine growing. The mountainous settings have this altitude between 850 to 1000 meters and a rich soil with good nutrients for the vines. The climate while hot and dry has big temperature differences between day and night which is excellent, and the desert bordering the south of this area takes all moisture away, making these vineyards almost disease exempt. Before the muslim conquest here the area was known as one of the best for wine with several quotation of the bible or other ancient texts naming it in that regard. The facility Michel Murciano says that when they arrived here in 2000 they looked for a building that could have the right size and if possible was thick enough to keep cool inside. They found an available concrete building outside the jewish enclave but they saw immediately that with the right refitting they could turn it into a wine facility. The thing is, they grew very rapidly from 100 000 bottles in 2001 at the start to 700 000 bottles in 2007. They went down a bit since but will bounce back to 800 000 bottles this year probably. The building is now a bit small for their current output and also they can't really receive visitors there, so they've been looking for a new site. They found it and they are in the process to get the administrative authorizations to build the facility and the visitor center. This will be near the highway between Kiryat Arba and Hebron, with a beautiful view on a few vineyards (picture of the lot on left - the pic on left shows the first buildings of Qiryat Arba as seen from near this lot). Selling to visitors is very important, some wineries in Israel like Tishbi he says make as much as 20 % of their sales with visitors stopping at the winery.
The lot is still a large piece of unused, rocky land shaped like a small hill. They found it 7 years ago now, but it took an additional 6 years to get the administration green light and to get the papers. They plan to take advantage of the slope on this small hill and build with gravity in mind so that the different stages of the winemaking make as little use of pumps as possible, from the harvest reception to the fermentation vats and to the cask room. They will dig underground cellars too for the élevage. Ouajdi and Michel in front of the winery Before showing me the facility where they have been making the wine until now near Kiryat Arba, Michel Murciano warns me that it’s messy and not really nice but what I saw seemed to me very correct and clean, and I’ve seen more mess in many of the best wineries in France (I've told him repeatedly). After driving through a passage outside of Kiryat Arba (which is actually a modern suburban community with fences all around to prevent from terror attacks) we park along a group of aging cement wharehouses with few signs hinting at a winery except a few pallets of empty bottles and a few vats. The presses which have been stored outside are protected from the scorching sun by a light roof. Hevron Heights winery employs 10 staff, among them Ouajdi who poses here with Michel in front of the winery. A vatroom Once inside you walk through a familiar vatroom with stainless-steel vats of different sizes. We see the 12 vats that were brought here first, than other ones with floating lids that came later as the winery grew in size. He buys many of these vats from Mangeard which is based in Jarnac in the midst of Cognac country in south-western France, he says that the people are his friends. Many of these vats are self-emptying meaning that the bottom is oblique to ease the emptying. He regrets that some of them have a slope of only 3 % which is way under what it should be to be really convenient. The temperature of each vat is controlled of course. Eleazar in the chai The Hevron Heights winery is kosher, which means that the staff allowed to manipulate the wine and touch the vats and casks must be observant jews. Eleazar who is pictured here was born in Hebron and he is in charge with doing the cellar and chai tasks. The vats on this picture are from Slovenia and manufactured by a company named ŠKRLJ Kovinska Oprema, they are also temperature regulated and they brought them in in 2007. What is great with these vats is that they have an in-built punch-down system to to the operation on a very precise and soft manner (see this picture on left, shot from the opening in the bottom). They can also control the time and frequency of these punch-downs and repeat them without hazardous variations. They make the high-tier wines here. Otherwise, They have been buying additional vats whenever they needed more capacity.
Another great vat, Michel Murciano says, is this special vat (pictured on right) used for very long fermentations. With this vat, which also comes from Slovenia, they can take the seeds out without moving the wine. One must know first that grape seeds are a potential danger during long fermentations because they release greenish, undesirable notes into the wine.
An elaborate lock to expel the seeds The bulging part beneath the vat is where the seeds fall by gravity and there's a lock with a pump to get them out before it impacts the wine without having to rack the whole vat. There's a draining system to gather the seeds when they fall in the bottom so that they get to the low end where they can expel them with the lock. They do this operation several times during the long fermentations. This 9-hectoliter vat is almost a prototype, it has been ordered by Jacques Humeau who was the chief winemaker here until very recently [edit oct 28 2011]. I would have liked to see this French enologist who presided over the winemaking of these great wines that I have tasted with Michel in France, but he was not in Israel when I visited Hebron. About these special vats that we saw here, they use these custom tools to make the top-tier wines. Speaking of the volume for these wines, they make a total of about 60 000 to 80 000 bottles annually. The press Right now the presses are stored outside under a protective roof because of lack of room, and Michel Murciano says that at harvest time the whole place looks different because the presses and harvest reception tools are then moved to their operation al spot. Then, they bring for example this 40-hectoliter press right beneath the spot where the trucks unload the harvest. The best cuvées of Hevron Heights, the ones that are exported, are made from hand-harvested grapes delivered in boxes which are emptied manually. There's a destemming machine on the side along with a pump, and the whites go straight to the press after destemming while the reds go directly to the vatroom.
They also have a flash-pasteurization tool for the niche market of mevuchal wines, sacramental wines. This machine made by Gilson in France brings the mevushal wines to a temperature of 85 ° C for a few seconds then cooled back to normal. Of course the best cuvées are not pasteurized, only the lower wines. The market for meshuval wine is going down anyway as the jewish public becomes more demanding.
Speaking of tools, there is also this special vat that they bought in Beaune (in a winery) : this is an horizontal vat with a system inside which is moved slowly by chains and reproduces a punching down : the grapes move smoothly up and down and the result is very nice. See the picture on the right. A cask room They have a few temperature-controlled cask rooms for the élevage of the best cuvées, some rooms being large rooms like this one ot tiny adjunctions that they build inside the main vatroom with walls and a door. They are increasibly in shortage of space and the new facility will be easing this problem a lot. Right now they have an élevage capacity of 650 casks. They work mostly with one French cooperage, the Tonnellerie du Sud Ouest because they want a stability with the type of casks. They buy the casks new but they keep it so the wines are made overall with casks of varied age.
They bottled everything here with a Costral Comet machine. But an important thing to say is that their high-tier cuvées are stored in the cellar for a minimum of 8 months after bottling in closed (dark) pallets, without the labels, in tiré bouché like the vignerons say in France. For example when I visited they were in the process of putting the labels on a batch of Hevron Heights, Jerusalem Heights 2005 which stayed in casks two years that is until the spring of 2008 and is only going out from its bottle élevage now.
Here on the right you can see a wall of bottles stored in the dark (except when we drop in the room for acheck...), these are Hevron Heights, Jerusalem Heights Cabernet Sauvignon 2007, it spent 14 months in casks and is still having its bottle élevage now. A tiny plot of Cabernet Sauvignon in Hebron (Tel Rumeida settlement) Hevron Heights buys its grapes in a 50 km radius around Hebron, with a project to expand the contracted surface in the immediate proximity of Hebron where the conditions are particularly suited for vineyards. Right now they get only 60 tons of grapes from the immediate proximity compared with a total of 700 tons. The grapes for the Makhpelah cuvée for example come from a village named Bat'ain (means the daughter of the eye), 15 km from Hebron. Michel Murciano says that he is negotiating with local arab growers for having wine grape-varieties grown right near Hebron : the purchased-grapes deal would offer a better income to the growers compared to what the table grapes yield in revenues, and this is also a way to work together with local arabs, which they already do in many ways but it would be on a more organized scale. When you work with someone he is not the devil anymore. I’ve read by the way somewhere that the economy on the West Bank is thriving compared to Gaza, precisely because of a more open mindset, business investments and bilateral economic relations. This issue is not much reported by the mainstream European media which prefers the black and white picture of the victimization card. The number of big, new homes built in the muslim part of the area seems to confirm that the economy is also developping here. The picture above was shot in Tel Rumeida, the tiny settlement which is located the deepest in Hebron and consists of a few mobile homes with kindergarten built on a hill near 800-year old olive trees and also near an excavation site where ancient jewish constructions were found, including a wine press (the settlement is the white line of buildings at the top of this bushy hill on this satellite view). Moshe (picture) recently planted this tiny plot of Cabernet Sauvignon. the place is very beautiful and peaceful even though it's a fault line between two communities. When you walk among the extremely old olive trees (pic on right) you fall upon jewish kids and you may also see palestinian children as the first houses are close by. Very old olive trees From the heights of Tel Rumeida, you can see the muslim-only city of Hebron in the far, a place where it would be dangerous to venture into if your outlook is not 100 % arab muslim. In between there is this very beautiful olive-tree orchard where you may stumble upon (like we did) a few Israeli soldiers checking the area for ill-intentioned intruders. Tel Rumeida is a strange place, at the same time eerily peaceful, but with this unpredictable violence that can build up through mosque incitement.
These olive trees seem really extremely old. We have also old olive trees in France (although many froze in the big frost of 1956), but I nerver saw such big and old-looking olive trees there. That's why they could indeed be 800 years old. Otherwise, in the History-of-Hebron document linked at the bottom of the page, I found these lines speaking about olive trees on Tel Rumeida, but it's not clear if they were planted then (200 years ago) or if they were already planted since long time ago :
In 1807, the Hebron community, by means of its agent, Rabbi Hayyim Yeshua Bejano, purchased additional parcels of land in two locations: the area abutting the Jewish quarter (the “market”) and a large area including Tel Hebron (Rumeida). The acquisitions are identifiable to this day by the olive trees that were planted there. The heads of the Muslim Waqf confirmed the purchases by means of signed kushans (deeds). Djaoui, in a table-grape vineyard near Hebron As we were driving in the arab side near Hebron I noticed someone working or checking vines near a rich villa. We stopped and walked to the vineyard. A worker named Djaoui was there and as he was speaking some English we could chat a few minutes with also Michel who speaks some Arabic. Many of the locals know some Hebrew too as there's still a lot of peaceful exchange between the communities. I was impressed by the way this vineyard was standing high above ground, a little bit like the ones in the Yamanashi Prefecture in Japan. Djaoui said that these grapes in the region are a delicacy and can be purchased well into decermber. He invited me to come again any time in Hebron next autumn to check by myself. Michel kneeled down to take some earth in his hands, saying again that the terroir in the area is excellent for many crops and fruit trees, including for wine grape varieties. As we asked about the rich villa rigt near the vineyard plot, Djaoui volunteered to help us meet the owner. We walked the long alley bordered on both sides with gorgeous flowers and reached the terraced surroundings of the house where a child came to us. Several minutes later a man in his early 60s' came out and Michel and himself exchanged a few words, he invited us in the open room under the house for a few pastries and tea if we wanted. We spent there a few minutes and this was an unexpected experience to witness people from the two communities speaking casually without tensions. This was also totally unplanned as I was the one who spotted this worker and suggested it might be a good idea to go see what he was doing. Michel says that the relations are most of the time like this, he works routinely with many local muslims, be they artisans, workers or else, and things tend to be smooth when people get to know each other. But there's still a peer pressure and if the situation in the area gets tense for any reason, they can't go indivudual. This is still Hamastan over here with all the incitement in the local Arabic media, and that's also why selling land to non-muslims is too risky for them. Jewish children in central Hebron Jews have been living along with arab muslims for ages in Hebron until the pogrom of 1929 which started by inflamatory sermons in local mosques (sounds familiar). About 70 jews were killed then by a violent mob breaking into jewish homes with knives and axes. The jews left en masse the city shortly after, abandonning their homes and properties, and the city had remained Judenrein since. Some jews returned to Hebron proper in the 1970s, mostly in the vicinity of the jewish holy site of the Tomb of the Patriarchs, but they have to remain under the protection of small units of the IDF (Israeli military) as the genocidal mood is still very high among some local muslims, and the terror groups like Hamas being also very active. Most jews coming back in the area live in Kiryat Arba which is basically a new town built next to Hebron and where there's more protection. They're what we use to call West Bank settlers, a word that carries a heavy demonizing stigma including in the West. This may have compelled some wine critics to shun the wines for being made in an area which is supposed to remain Judenrein. Hebron - the Cave of the Patriarchs Many of the Hevron Heights cuvées ready for the market are sold out but I still tasted a few wines (and brought a couple of bottles home for later tasting).
__ Hevron Heights Chardonnay Elone Mamre 2010. Not on the market yet. The first such Chardonnay was made in 2002, then none until this small batch of 1500 bottles and Michel wanted me to taste it. Nice richness and gliding feel in the mouth. There's a bit of wood there, which he aknowledges and will correct for the next batch (they should have a bigger volume of Chardonnay in 2011). Marme is one of the names given in the antiquity to the city of Hebron, as you can find in the bible he says. Sometimes, the city is also named as Qiryat Arba in the bible. Elone Mamre means the Oaktrees of Mamre.
__ Hevron Heights, Judean Heights Tempranillo. I'm ashamed, no notes, even though I remember that was a nice, powerful wine (we were having lunch with Michel and his wife at their Qiryat Arba home when he opened it).
You can find my notes for the last available wines that I had tasted a few months earlier in France on this post (scroll down).

Michel Murciano and his wife have 5 children, one of the youngest, a cute little girl, brought me (as we were having lunch) a plastic mug on which she had drawn a tree and several people... 60 % of Hevron Heights wines are exported, to the United States (see also here in New Jersey), the Netherlands (here is a wine product page), France (here are the prices for the French market), Brazil, Panama, Mexico and Japan.

Links :
Tasting notes for Hevron Heights Cab-Merlot 2005 (including Jancis Robinson's notes)
Detailed History of Hebron
Day visit to Hebron from Jerusalem.

Hevron Heights winery Moshav Geulim 42820 Israel phone + 972 9 894 37 11 mm [at] terres-saintes [dot] com www.terres-saintes.com

Very, very old olive tree... That is what I'd call a very, very old tree. These olive trees of Tel Rumeida in their beautiful and preserved setting near the fault line of a long conflict, was one of the most impressive experiences I had here.

Comments

[Caroline]

This winery is NOT located in Israel, it's located in an Israeli settlement built in the city of Hebron, deep inside the Palestinian territory (West Bank). This winery should be listed as part of Palestinian wineries.

[Bert]

This is a point of view, legally speaking, this may not be "Israeli administered" territory, but this is a side issue. Jews were pushed out of town (through pogroms, again) and have otherwise always been living there, they're not foreign people coming out of nowhere, they're just back.