This article was published on WINE BUSINESS MONTHLY June 2016 issue and is published here at Grape-man.com with the kind permission of WBM.
Israel has made as much progress in quality winemaking in the last 20 years as any country on the planet. The challenge is getting non-Jewish consumers to notice. Some American wine lovers, at least, are paying attention. Israel’s exports of wine to the United States have nearly tripled by value since 2009. Israel is now the 12th largest supplier of wine to the U.S. by volume, just ahead of Greece, according to annual numbers from DISCUS.
Most wine shop owners I spoke with assume that most of their clients who buy Israeli wines are Jewish. But Adam Dromi, a wine buyer for The Wine House in Los Angeles, says his store has had success with a general audience by concentrating on the quality of the wines. “We’re switching the signs around now,” Dromi said. “We’re not going to have a kosher section. We’re going to have an Israel section. The problem is that for so long, kosher meant ‘bad.’ As soon as we changed the focus to Israel, the wines sold better.”
The Wine House seems to be ahead of the curve in marketing Israeli wines to a broader audience. That said, the Jewish market, while a niche, is a significant one. The United States has about as many Jews as the whole nation of Israel; Jews make up about 2.2 percent of the U.S. population, according to the Pew Research Center, and there are few teetotalers as Jewish religious ceremonies require wine.
Geographically, it’s easy to use Wine Searcher to see where Israeli wines are selling. They are most common, by a large margin, in New York and New Jersey. Los Angeles is one of the biggest markets outside the Northeast. But high-end Israeli wines have spread into other areas that would have been surprising not long ago. The Utah Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control has wines from Netofa, a boutique Rhône-varietal producer. Total Wine & More sells Domaine du Castel, one of the best and most expensive Israeli wines, in its stores in Missouri and Texas.
“Israeli wine has really improved over the last decade or so,” said Geoff Pattison, director of imports at Wally’s Wine & Spirits in Los Angeles. “A lot of newer producers are trying to make wine from the terroir it comes from. That hasn’t always been true. It’s really becoming a place where wineries are making wine that can compete on the world stage.”
If that’s true, and a tasting of modern Israeli wines bears it out, it makes one look differently at the existing marketing niche. Lots of unexpected countries are making world-class wine these days—Uruguay, Georgia, Slovenia and Slovakia, to name a few, but the list could go on—without 2 percent of the U.S. population having an extra incentive to buy them.
So for many stores that have been successful selling Israeli wines, rather than expand the client base, the trick has been to expand the times of year when Jewish people buy Israeli wine. Many Jewish people eat taboo food like bacon cheeseburgers most of the year, but suddenly keep kosher in the days around Passover. That’s when the market for Israeli wine spikes. “The biggest [Israeli] wine-selling season is Passover season,” said Josh Feldman, owner of Potomac Wine & Spirits in Washington, D.C. “Unfortunately the mainstream market isn’t really informed about how good Israeli wines are. It’s hard to convince somebody to spend $30 on a bottle of Israeli wine when they can get a good California wine for that.”
But other stores have had success turning Israeli wines into a year-round proposition and not just in New York and L.A. “We’ve got clients who are really appreciative that we have them year round, not just at the high holidays,” said Marc Jonna, co-founder of Plum Market, a gourmet grocery store in Michigan. “People are really drinking these for quality over quantity. People want to come in and get a good tasting wine. They’re not as worried about cost.”
The Kosher Conundrum
One of the biggest movements in Israel among boutique wineries is stepping away from making kosher wines. Most Israeli winemakers are not orthodox Jews. For them to make kosher wines, they must hire orthodox supervisors who do all the hands-on work in the winery. People who are not orthodox Jews are not allowed to even touch the barrels, including the winemaker and winery owner.
Michael Avery is an Australian who is not Jewish and has been an assistant winemaker at Israel’s Golan Heights Winery since 2006. “Cleaning out a tank at harvest, setting up a pump—I still miss it,” Avery said. But like most winemakers in Israel, he doesn’t think the quality is affected by the kosher rules. However, many of Israel’s most interesting new boutique wineries are not kosher. An example is Sphera, which makes only white wine, which is very unusual in Israel as red wine is still king. Co-owner and winemaker Doron Rav Hon was head winemaker at Ella Valley Vineyards for 10 years and all those wines are kosher; there, Rav Hon didn’t even have the key to the winery. “Usually the exports in Israel are for the kosher market,” Rav Hon said. “The shelf in the back near the bathroom, it’s the kosher shelf. We are not in this game. We want to make quality Israeli wine.”
In Tel Aviv’s thriving restaurant scene, Sphera’s wines are easy to find, along with other hot, non-kosher names, like Bar-Maor, Sea Horse and Chillag. But Israeli supermarkets and hotels won’t carry non-kosher wine, and neither will U.S. importers. “Many of the wineries that start out this way become kosher,” Rav Hon said. “If they want to do volume, they have to be kosher. There is a ceiling for how much wine we can sell. Maybe if we stay below 30,000 bottles, we don’t have to be kosher.”
Sasson Ben-Aharon is winemaker for Mony Vineyard, which is owned by an Israeli-born Christian. “In the first two years the owner produced non-kosher wines,” Ben-Aharon said. “But the market was such that he had to make kosher wines.” Mony now has a U.S. importer.
The kosher issue is a double-edged sword for Israeli wineries. On the one hand, the market pushes them to be kosher, and there are customers who want kosher wines. On the other hand, many people—including many
Jews—believe being kosher makes the wines inferior, confusing “kosher” with “mevushal.” The latter are wines that can be served by non-Jews on holy days, and they have been briefly pasteurized. A generation ago, many Israeli wines were mevushal; now, generally only the cheapest wines are. But the distinction is not common knowledge even among people who sell a lot of kosher wine.
The other big hurdle to mainstream acceptance is price. Orthodox winery workers don’t come cheap, and Israeli wines are often more expensive than comparable wines from Europe. “The average retail customer who’s going to spend $100 is not going to go to Israel. They’re going to go to Napa or Bordeaux,” Dromi said. “The Yarden Cabernet retails these days for $35 or $40. That’s not going to get someone non-Israeli or non-Jewish to buy these wines.”
Blake Gray won the Roederer Award in 2013 for Best Online Wine Columnist/Blogger. He is publisher of The Gray Report, which won Best Industry Blog in 2012 at the Wine Blog Awards. He lives in San Francisco.
