Agur, Israel
This visit was very interesting on many regards, it helped me understand how the winemaking wave has grown deep in the country, here is a very small operation with maybe 2000 bottles yearly altogether all sold locally including to occasional busloads of domestic visitors who kind of want to experience a wine tour deep in the country.
The Mettler Winery is located in Agur also at mid distance between Jerusalem and Ashkelon,
in a moshav backed to a relatively large forest, maybe 7 kilometers from the green line. This is a mom-and-pop operation, actually set next to the owners' home with a leafy garden around and the parcels very close.
Heinz Mettler came in the wine trade very late, in 2014. His life story is interesting, he came originally from Switzerland, landing here in Israel in 1975, by accident he says, at a time he was living a travel life; he's not Jewish but he liked the place and stayed in the country with his girlfriend, finding work thanks to his engineering skills (compressors & electric motors) in the Sinai region which was then still under Israeli control. When the Sinai was given over to Egypt he moved west in different places until he decided to look for a quiet house in the back country. He had always been a passionate biker, rinding successively a Triumph Bonneville, a Motoguzzi and a BMW (occasionally going through a couple of accidents) and while touring around the area of Agur which is a biker's paradise with its winding roads, he knew that was the place. Finding a house is not always easy in Israel, Heinz had found a couple of ones in the north of Israel but hadn't managed to finalize the deal with the issue of multiple owners when the sale involves inheritance issues. Here in this moshav he found a house with lots of renovation work to do but a great garden around if also with lots of work to do in it to bring it back to its old glory.
And when Heinz first saw this place there was these fragrances coming from all these flowers when he first visited the moshav, the land was very generous and this made him tick. He just told his wife he had found a wonderful area where they should search a house, not telling her about the advantages on the biking issue for which she was not warming that much, and she called a property dealer, they visited 20 houses none of which gave them the triggering until they saw this one with the bougainvilleas overflowing over the untended hedges. And actually there was a winery facility included in the property with an underground chai and cellar, also in a pretty bad shape by the way. He didn't want to make wine at this stage, telling his wife this was so much work to make wine, and that they should skip this wine thing in the beginning and concentrate first on rebuilding the house but oddly she was the one who said it will be everything or nothing, so that's how he immediately work of the winery and vineyard side as well.
Heinz has us seat on this terrace in the shade, beautiful setting indeed. He brings a couple of wines of his production, first a cuvée named Keren, a blend of a Cabernet Sauvignon Syrah and a bit of Petit Verdot, using the latter to make the Cabernet a little more easy to drink. His daughter made the label design. I asked about his training if he studied somewhere before embarking in this adventure, he says he didn't know anything 6 and a half years ago, so he asked an viticulture expert to have a look and tell him what to do and the guy told him to bring a tractor. He asked why a tractor and the guy said to uproot all the vines, but he said no way, he wouldn't pull up the vines. Of course these vines (which are 16 years old now) had been abandonned quite a while and had to be brought back into production through the correct pruning and he needed time for that. So the yields were very low at the beginning, he picked 600 kilograms on 2 dunams (0,2 hectare), then 800 kg the 2nd year, then 1500 kg and in 2017 they got 2400 kg. He has a worker sometimes to do some work in the vineyard, he's a professinnal. And for the winemaking he hired a wine expert who taught him and his wife how to make wine, their first vintage being 2014 and it came out very good (they had a volume of 800 bottles that year).
Here is the open-air chai where the grapes are delivered from the vineyard, Heinz said it was in a very bad shape also and they worked a lot on it. I guess they can do the pressing here in the outside under the tarpaulin and have the juice flow by gravity into the cellar underground.
I asked if it's that easy to start a winery operation in Israel, if he had to ask for permission to a special administration, he says no, you can do everything until sopmedy asks, he says with a laugh [I wished France also had this litlle Middle-Eastern something to make things smoother for new vignerons], adding that as long as you pay the required taxes it's fine.
They also make their own olive oil here with 15 trees, they have the olives pressed at a kibbutz nearby Beit Neut, not sure I spelled the name correctly. They use the oil only for house consumption of for their guests as they make only 60 to 70 liters a year. But there's more, heinz's wife who wasn't there thet afternoon is also making craft beer, and Heinz gave me one which I
had in Tel aviv, it was just great, smooth and refreshing liquid food. She has been making beer for 2 years now and makes 10 different types of beer, selling them only here at the winery/house; this gives a glimpse of the beer/wine movement going on in this country, there are certainly many operations like this one, the products of which you'll find nowhere but on the production site. They have groups visiting here who have the chance to buy them, he receives for example groups from China and Korea, all of them were very surprised to see all this including all the fruits in the orchard, from which his indefatigable wife makes jam, also for sale here. Actually visitors pass through here, just look at their Tripadvisor page, they have a couple of independent rooms to rent in the garden and you can enjoy the local food, wine and beer, why ask for more....
At one point Heinz recalls when he witnessed from some distance the terror attacks against hotels in Aqaba and Taba, Jordan. That was in 2010 and he had a team of workers in the area to do some work related to portable generators for telecommunication. As he was driving along the Aqaba Gulf to Aqua Sun he was on the phone with his workers and he saw what
looked like fireworks in the distance except that they were of just one color, and where he reached his destination he learnt this was a coordinated attack on Taba and Aqaba, a car had blew up. In Israel people are used to such occasionnal encounters with genocidal enemies but they manage to keep their temper and go on their daily life including going out in bars and restaurants. I ask if it's true that Israel discreetly helps Egypt in its fight against terror groups in the Sinaï, he says nothing is official and diplomatically [for the dosmestic audience in Egypt] it's better not to talk about it...
I asked Heinz how he could manage to get residency status when he arrived in this country, he laughs and says this isn't possible but everything happens in this country, not saying how it happenned exactly though. He said he made his time in the Army here (around 1991), they wanted to send him to a fighting unit but as a warm-blooded Swiss he wasn't very open to the restrictive rules of engagement here, so the Army was wary of having him on hot spots... He still made 6 months and after that like all young people in this country he had to do Milu'im (reserve duty) every year for a few weeks, most of the young people carrying their service guns on the trains or buses (a surprising view for visiting foreigners) are certainly on their reserve-duty time, commuting between home and their unit.
They make also a grappa, they have a copper distillery tools here and they do it from late august, the volume is like 11 to 12 liter of pure alcohol from 60 liters of juice. They also make arak, with the anise (read what follows that twice, this is Israel and everything is possible) bought in Haifa but they orinally sourced in Syria and imported here through Lebanon. For the anecdote he had one a group of visitors working for Intel who were from a Druze village up the north, he gave them a bottle of his arak and they called him later that the people of their village who tasted it said it was like the arak they had in Lebanon. You understand now why the former South-Lebanon militiamen behind the El Namroud distillery also make the best arak of Israel...
Heinz pours us some grappa, he says it's a little less than 50 %, the original base spirit being between 75 & 80 %. That's powerful but very sweet too, very smooth somehow. He doesn't have any left but otherwise sells it fot 100 Shekels (24 €), i don't remember the voleme but probably 50cl.
Heinz had also us taste his cuvée Or 2016, Or means light in Hebrew, it's a red blend with Marselan, Cabernet Sauvignon and Petit Verdot, about 1/3 each, Marselan brings a character close the the Chianti. Tastes very different, he says because of the Marselan part, with more acidity, makes it very Chianti, very Italian. Heinz says another year in the bottle will have it become softer, and also he says we should have had the bottle cool a bit more. My prefered wine is certainly his Cabernet Sauvignon among the ones I tasted that day. While we speak on the terrace I notice the noisy bird singing its exotic song nearby, Heinz says it's been a nuisance that came 2 years ago, the bird is Myna, an invasive species coming from India and is eating everything particularly the grapes, they had to cover the sides of the parcels with nets (just the border row because the birds don't go inside the block), the birds getting stuck in the net when they venture in there.
We look with Heinz to his plot of Cabernet Sauvignon near the house, that's the parcel which the viticulture technician years ago told him to uproot when he had just bought the property. Now after careful pruning and tending it's back in production and recovered from years of neglect and Heinz feels vindicated to have followed his instinct. The baby grapes are already well shaped on the clusters, with still flowers in place. He explains that he keeps the foliage covering the bunches on the exposed side in order to keep the grapes cool from the punishing sun beams. On the other side he takes care not to have foliage too close from the bunches as he doesn't want humidity to cause problems (fungus) inside.
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