The Blossoming Negev

Visiting Israel’s emerging desert wine industry in the south of the country.

The Yatir forest vineyards in snow. Dudi Eldar

by Gamliel Kronemer
Special To The Jewish Week

O n a recent cold and rainy Tuesday, at 6:30
in the morning, I found myself in Tel Aviv’s Central Railway Station. I was there to meet Daniel Rogov, the wine and restaurant critic for the Israeli daily newspaper, Haaretz, and author of the annually published book, “Rogov’s Guide to Israeli Wines.” After a hasty cup of espresso, and a small croissant, Rogov and I quickly boarded a southbound train. We were heading to the Negev Desert to taste wines from Israel’s newest up-and-coming wine-growing region.
For decades sizable numbers of tourists have visited a few of Israel’s large and long-established wineries, such as Carmel and the Golan Heights Winery. And in the past few years wine tourism had become one of the

fastest-growing sectors of the Israeli tourism industry. As the quality of Israeli wines continues to improve, and the number of Israeli wineries continues to grow, more and more tourists are dedicating days at a time to visiting various wineries.
While most of these wine tourists limit themselves to spending time at wineries in the Judean Hills, the Costal Plain, the Galilee, or the Golan Heights, a growing handful have started to explore the remarkable wines coming from Israel’s desert south, and the wineries that produce them.
The 85-minute train ride from Tel Aviv to the desert city of Beersheva was rather pleasant. During my stay in Israel, I had the opportunity to ride on Israel Railways on a number of occasions, and generally found the trains to be clean, well maintained, comfortable, and reasonably on-time. Unlike Israel’s inter-city busses, however, the trains are not geared toward handling tourists, and few of the signs or announcements I encountered included any English.
After the chilly drizzle of Tel Aviv, the bright sun and desert heat of Beersheva was a pleasant shock to the system. Although originally Rogov and I had been scheduled to visit four of the 14 wineries located throughout the Negev, a flash-flood warning forced us to cancel all but one stop on our itinerary — a visit to Yatir, the Negev’s northernmost winery. Ya’akov Ben Dor, the winery’s managing director, met us at the station.
Named for the nearby Yatir Forest, the Yatir Winery was founded in 2000 through a joint venture between local grape growers and the Israeli wine giant, Carmel. The winery, which produces approximately 120,000 bottles of wine each year, is now wholly owned by Carmel but is run autonomously by Ben Dor and head winemaker Eran Goldwasser.
Before heading to the winery for our tasting, Ben Dor took us on a driving tour of the Yatir Forest. Approximately 10 square miles in area, with more than 4 million trees, and standing in stark contrast to the surrounding desert, the manmade Yatir Forest is an extraordinary sight.
The forest, which was planted by the Jewish National Fund, starting in 1964, is home to four of the winery’s vineyards, and these vineyards are impressive. Using state-of-the-art viticulture technology, including a computer-controlled system that periodically releases measured amounts of water and fertilizer at the base of each vine, the Yatir Winery is able to grow low-yield, high-quality grapes of a sort that would have been commercially infeasible to grow in such an arid environment only a few decades ago.
The forest is also home to numerous archeological sites, including multiple yekevim — ancient stone-lined pits for the crushing and fermenting of grapes into wine — and Ani’im, the fascinating site of a fourth-century fortress that includes the ruins of a large stone synagogue and dozens of underground dwellings.
After leaving the forest we headed to the winery for a tour and tasting. Yatir Winery is located near Tel Arad in the northeastern corner of the desert. The winery, housed inside a handful of non-descript industrial buildings, is home to an impressive array of state-of-the-art winemaking equipment.
At the winery, where we were met by Goldwasser, we tasted seven wines from the 2006 and 2007 vintages, including samples of some that were still aging in the barrel. All of the wines were interesting, and a few of them had a distinctly Australian character, reflecting the unique winemaking style of the Australian-trained Goldwasser.
We also tasted the most recently released vintage of their premiere wine, Yatir Forest. The 2004 Yatir Forest is a dark and inky, full-bodied, Australian-styled red with a fascinating nose of cassis, cherries, plums and toasted oak, with a hint of tobacco smoke. Look for flavors of blackberries, boysenberries, plums, cassis and toasted oak, with hints of vanilla and allspice, and pleasant earthy undertones. This wine is drinking well now but should be able to cellar until 2011. (Score A. $64.99 Available at Gotham Wine and Liquors, 2517 Broadway, Manhattan, [212] 932-0990.)
Before catching an afternoon train back to Tel Aviv we decided to have lunch at Yakota, a kosher Moroccan restaurant that has become a venerable Beersheva institution.
Founded in 1965 and located in the old part of the city, Yakota has long been known for its truly authentic country-style Moroccan cuisine. The interior of the restaurant is bright and airy, yet at the same time somehow manages to radiate a homey feeling.
Based on the advice of the owner, who seems to know virtually all of his customers on a first-name basis by the time they leave his restaurant, we ordered a three-course meal: a first course of half a dozen different exquisitely prepared salads that were served with freshly baked bread; a main course of three different tagines (stews prepared in conical-lidded earthenware pots); and a variety of phyllo-dough pastries with mint tea for dessert.
The menu offers a broad array of choices in terms of meat and poultry, and we decided to order tagines made with cuts of meat rarely found on menus in the U.S. The first was a mixture of remarkably tender calf’s headmeat and tripe cooked in a beefy sauce that was flavored with citrus and herbs. The second consisted of soft pieces of oxtail cooked in a dark, slightly sweet, almost barbeque-like sauce. The third consisted of bite-size, melt-in-your-mouth-soft pieces of calf’s brains, cooked in a light-colored, aromatic sauce, flavored with thyme, marjoram, allspice and celery seed. (The food bill for the three of us came to just under $100, and the four glasses of Goldstar beer we ordered added another $17 to the bill.)
After lunch Rogov and I boarded our train back to Tel Aviv, and by the time we emerged from the train into the drizzly Tel Aviv dusk, it was almost hard for me to believe that I had been in the desert heat such a short time ago.
David Ben-Gurion, the late Israeli prime minister, once spoke of his dream of seeing the desert blossom, and in my brief time in the Negev, I saw that his dream is well on its way to coming to fruition. Although the Negev Desert will never draw the same numbers of wine tourists as Israel’s more centrally located wine regions, if one has the time, it is certainly worth the effort to head south and explore the wines of the blossoming desert. n
Entrance to the Yatir Forest is free and open to the public. Those interested in visiting the Yatir Winery should contact the winery at 011-972-8-995-9090 ext. 105 or at y_yatir@zahav.net.il. Yakota Restaurant is located at 27 Mordai Haghetta’ot, in Beersheva, and may be contacted at 011-972-8-623-2689.
Gamliel Kronemer writes the monthly Fruit of the Vine wine column for The Jewish Week.

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