Scientist seeks wine fit for king
The redevelopment of local grape varietals in the West Bank is a quest to underscore Jewish roots in the holy land.
The new crisp, acidic and mineral white from a highend Israeli winery was aged for eight months — or, depending on how you look at it, at least 1,800 years.
The wine, called marawi and released last month by Recanati Winery, is the first commercially produced by Israel’s growing modern industry from indigenous grapes. It grew out of a groundbreaking project at Ariel University in the occupied West Bank that aims to use DNA testing to identify — and recreate — ancient wines drunk by the likes of King David and Jesus Christ.
Elyashiv Drori, the Ariel oenologist who heads the research, traces marawi — also called hamdani — and jandali grapes to A.D. 220 based on a reference in the Babylonian Talmud.
“All our scriptures are full with wine and with grapes — before the French were even thinking about making wine, we were exporting wine,” he said. “We have a very ancient identity and, for me, reconstructing this identity is very important. For me, it’s a matter of national pride.”
The redevelopment of local varietals, however — like so many things in this contested land — is not free of political friction. It comes alongside contentious new labelling guidelines by the European Union requiring that wines from the West Bank and the Golan Heights carry a label saying they were made in Israeli settlements. And Palestinians have their own ownership claims on these grapes.
For Israeli winemakers, the search for old-new varietals is an opportunity to distinguish their wares in a competitive global marketplace where they harbour little hope of improving on, say, Chardonnay from France. Archeologists and geneticists are testing new methods for analyzing charred ancient seeds. In the endless struggle between Israelis and Palestinians, it is a quest to underscore Jewish roots in the holy land.
But Recanati is not the first to sell wine from these grapes. Cremisan, a small winery near Bethlehem where Palestinians partner with Italian monks, has been using hamdani, jandali and other local fruit since 2008.
“As usual in Israel, they declare that falafel, tehina, tabbouleh, hummus and now jandali grapes are an Israeli product,” Amer Kardosh, Cremisan’s export director, sniped in an email
Given the difficulty of procuring the grapes from Palestinian farmers, Recanati produced just 2,480 bottles of the 2014 marawi, which is available in only about 10 Tel Aviv restaurants. The winery has about 4,000 bottles of 2015 marawi aging and hopes to soon plant its own vineyard to expand and refine the brand.
Next up is dabouki, also white, which the wellknown Israeli vintner Avi Feldstein plans to debut along with his new winery in a couple of months. Dabouki might be the oldest of the local varieties, a good candidate for what filled the cup of Jesus (who Drori believes drank white as well as red).
Feldstein said he has about 800 bottles each of 2014 and 2015 dabouki.
“If you are a true winemaker, you want to express a place,” Feldstein said. “Without locality and the diversification it gives, wine is reduced to alcoholic Coca-Cola.”