Grapes and Sensibility

Lahat Winery's “Cool Wines”: Whites and Rosé 2024

Contemporary musicians – meaning those from the sixties – point to several independent events that simultaneously shaped rock music. Apart from the shift from semi-psychedelics to heroin in the early seventies, 1984 is remembered as the year in which the most significant change in the genre took place. That year, most major studios switched from analog to digital recording, and the sound of every record changed overnight. The shift was not only in terms of audio quality or dynamic range – it was also, and perhaps above all, a move away from recordings in which "feel" reigned, toward recordings that were "smart" or "sophisticated”.

Throughout the generations, emotion and personal touch have worked the same magic that breathes life into great and exceptional wines. In "cool wines" – whites and rosé – oxygen management and phenolic control are critical already at the juice-handling stage. Sophisticated technological tools exist today for precisely this purpose. And yet, what is needed there is exactly that same "something extra": that same "hand" and that same instinct, which know when to allow a touch of oxygen and a gentle brush of skin contact. The result, in the Lahat mold, is wines with a personal, expressive and sensory character – yet still harmonious, complex, crisp and fresh, with a clear expression of grape variety and terroir.

The first Lahat white wines were made using a method known as whole bunch pressing. Over the years I moved away from that approach in favor of deliberate skin contact and experimentation with macerations of varying duration. Today I no longer shy away from the skins: maceration is one of the ways to achieve richer, fuller and more complex white wines.

Lahat Garrigue Rosé: A Bridge Between Lahat's White and Red Wines

After years of experiments, trials and rosés made for others, the first rosé from the house of Lahat was bottled this year, in June.

Lahat Garrigue belongs to a school of winemaking that advocates patience and takes the long view – expressed in an extended stay at the winery, on the lees, in barrel. This is true of all Lahat wines, and now of the rosé as well. The approach deepens the wine's complexity and improves the stability of its various components – color, aroma and flavor. The goal is a wine of genuine culinary value, with complexity and aging potential.

As a bridge between Lahat's white and red wines, the Garrigue is made from the winery's red varieties, with a small portion of Roussanne, but using a winemaking technique closer to that used for the white wines.

The garrigue is the perennial scrubland vegetation that surrounds the vineyards – a regional hallmark and one of the most common descriptors for rosé wines characterized by aromas of wild herbs and aromatic plants. This is especially true of wines made from the red varieties that also go into the Lahat rosé: Syrah, Grenache and Mourvèdre.

The Wandering Winemaker

Rather ironically, whether I liked it or not, the past few months were generous in wanderings outside Israel. At the ProWein exhibition in Düsseldorf, I focused largely on tasting wines from Rhône Valley colleagues. There too, the importance of white wines has grown considerably in recent years, along with a clear investment in producing wines that are more elegant and precise than they once were.

At an illuminating gathering hosted by Enartis – a company specializing in products for the wine industry, including yeasts, enzymes, tannins and stabilizers, active in 50 countries – we focused on the growing importance of natural products from plant or yeast-derived sources. These are increasingly replacing traditional synthetic or animal-based alternatives. I then traveled to a conference held by the yeast and yeast product leading producer and supplier Lallemand, in Dijon. “Specific Yeast Derivation” was the subject, and it highlighted the importance of lees aging for wine longevity and complexity.

Finally, in mid-June, I visited Kefalonia in Greece at the invitation of the local winery association, where I delivered a lecture on irrigation. I shared with the wineries a reference point from an Israeli winemaker's perspective – speaking about the fundamental shift in mindset between an irrigated vineyard and a dry-farmed one that depends on the mercy of the gods, and how responsibility moves from Zeus to the winemaker and the grower. It was an intensive weekend that included a conference and visits to wineries and vineyards. What followed were ten days that were physically and emotionally overwhelming, with no ability to return to Israel, to my family, to the vineyards and the wines – because of the war.

Published: July 2025