Meet Asaf Margalit (right), winemaker and co-owner of Margalit Winery. We sat down with Asaf and asked about his life, his wines and his thoughts about the future of the Israeli wine industry.

You can Buy Margalit Wines Here Now

You can Visit Margalit Winery’s Website Here

About Asaf

Q:  Tell us about yourself and your family.

A:  My name is Asaf Margalit, and I am the winemaker of Margalit Winery and co-owner. I am happily married to my wife Naomi, and we have a wonderful 5-year-old son by the name of Jonathan.

Q:  Do you remember a moment you knew you would be a winemaker?

A:  I started learning physics at the university parallel to my work in the winery as my father’s apprentice. At the end of that year I decided I wanted to be a winemaker.

Q:  If you were not a winemaker what profession would you be in?

A:  Probably working in hi-tech. A good friend and I used to program computers when we were teenagers. He went on to become a big shot in Computers Associates LTD, and I became a winemaker. We see each other every week at the basketball court.

Q:  What are some of your favorite foods, and what wines do you like to pair with them?

A:  In general, I like everything, and I eat everything. I adore cool white wines that express characteristics of fruit, spring, flowers and spices (the less wood, the more the varietal characters). With them I like a light dish of rich food, like ceviche or my wife’s delicious quiche or good pasta.

Q:  How can a wine beginner get better at tasting all the stuff that experts say they taste in wine?

A:  Tasting and evaluating more and more to make your palate more sharp – drink, drink, drink. Taste and evaluate the wine with experts, talk to them, listen to their analysis of the wine and, while they do, smell and taste the wine to understand their breakdown.

About Margalit Winery and Israeli wines

Q:  What has made your winery so successful?

A:  Enjoyment – we love what we do.

Knowledge – my father wrote some of the best winemaking and wine chemistry textbooks.

Experience – we are now entering our 20^th year of professional winemaking.

Ownership – we own our vineyards and we make the decisions in the vineyards.

Small and humble – we prefer to think of ourselves as winemakers rather than businessmen.

Q:  What are you trying to achieve with your portfolio of wines? What do you want people to experience or take with them from the wines you make?

A:  We love the Bordeaux varieties, so our portfolio of wines is Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Cabernet Franc. They are rich and have a big spectrum of flavors. They grow beautifully in Israel, and we get wonderful grapes to work with.

We are somewhere between the New World and the Old World. I am influenced by both sides and try to implement what I like in my wines if it is possible. We make powerful fruity wines like the New World, and we make them with the finesse and elegance of the Old World. Our wines are rich, complex and powerful, but they are also elegant.

Q:  What is terroir?

A:  Looking in Wikipedia for terroir, you will find what the public thinks “terroir” is: “Terroir…was originally a French term in wine, coffee and tea used to denote the special characteristics that geography bestowed upon particular varieties.”

This is one way to look at it. I think it is much more than this. To explain my perception, I will tell a story.

When visiting Domaine de Chevalier, a friend and I were accompanied by Vice Director Mr. Remi Edange. While we toured the winery and vineyards, Mr. Edange kept saying over and over, “It is the terroir of this place.” At the end of the tour we were summoned to a big room with only a few antiques of wine equipment on the walls. Beside a big window facing the vineyards stood a big, old farm table. You could feel and see the years of work that was done on it. It added character and personality. On this beautiful table there were ten glasses forming a triangle and a bottle of wine from the winery. Mr. Edange opened the bottle, poured three glasses and handed them to us. From that moment, he stopped talking. This fine-looking, “unnecessary,” big room and the landscape outside were for that bottle of wine. In this bottle of wine there was the essence of the culture, heritage and the traditions of this place. This is terroir.

Q:  So terroir isn’t just about geography.

Terroir is well-connected to soil, climate and agriculture, but it embraces many more things, meanings and the essence of the culture and heritage.

For example, when you meet a Texas-born man, he greets you with “Howdy.” He talks about The Lone Star even though he knows it is a part of the United States. The same goes for the New Yorker with his unique accent. They all speak English and have much in common, but they want to save their own heritage, which is unique to that place only. It is not better or worse; it is different. Sometimes we love it, sometimes we laugh of it, but we all have it. In Hebrew we use the term “hatara le yoshna” – עטרה ליושנה. It means going back to our roots, to our heritage.

Q:  Why should Americans care about Israeli wines?

A:  Pure curiosity. I am sure they will be surprised by the quality of the wines, and they will start drinking them on regular basis.

Q:  What will the next 5 years hold for the Israeli wine industry?

A:  Israelis learn fast. Many of the winemakers have toured all over the winemaking world, many managers toured all over the wine business world and so on. We adapt many things we find and like. We explore our own terroirs and try many ways to improve our wines. I believe that in five years, the Israeli wine industry will be well-know and drunk all over the world. (The industry is certainly trying to market and brand itself to the world).

Asaf on the business side of winemaking

Q:  What is your strategy of vineyard management?

A:  I am no expert, but our winery owns two vineyards. First, Kadita Vineyard in the upper Galilee Mountains, which is planted with Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot grapes and a very small lot with Petite Syrah. The second vineyard is Binyamina Vineyard and is planted with Cabernet Franc grapes.

Although Israel is dry in summer with no rainfall at all, we choose to rely only on the winter rains and not to irrigate the vineyard at all. In order to do so, we irrigated the young vines during the first two years of growth and then gradually reduced the water quantity to force the vines’ roots to dig deep down and look for water resources there. After several years, the vines are able to grow and to produce excellent grapes by relying only on the winter rainfall.

We maintain only organic fertilization in the vineyard once every few years just before the winter rains. We use anti-fungicides and biological anti-insecticides to keep the vineyard free from specific harmful factors. The grapes are harvested when they reach full maturity according to our specification of ripeness. Harvesting is done by hand, in small buckets, in order to ensure the perfection of the grape clusters until they reach the winery.

Q:  What is your approach to yeasts in your winemaking?

We use cultivated yeasts – we use BDX ( Bordeaux red ). We like what we get in terms of flavors and colors. We did play with others out of curiosity, but we found that Bordeaux red is the best for what we like to express in our wines.

Q:  What does it mean to “filter” wine? Do you filter your wines? Why or why not?

A:  Filtering a wine is a necessary practice of wine making – everybody does it. Nobody wants to find a small creature in his bottled wine. The question is, what is the filter density? Sterile filter or coarse filter? A sterile wine filter will remove all yeasts and bacteria that may cause sediment and possibly re-fermentation, which is very important in most of the white wines. To be on the safe side, it is a common practice in commercial wineries for all wines, reds and whites.

The disadvantage of filtering is the possible reduction of color and tannins. Yes, some color molecules and tannins bond to the filter, but in my opinion, this is insignificant.

In some very big wineries who have lots of wine to filter, they mostly use a prefilter (mechanical separators ) – machines like kieselguhr light soil consisting of siliceous diatom remains which on one hand filter roughly and on the other hand bond color, smell and taste molecules in considerable numbers which do effect the quality of the wine. Then they use the filter machine.

Wineries use the term “unfiltered” for marketing reasons if they do not use a sterile filter. I can claim that my wines are “unfiltered.” But, of course, you would never see this claim on a bottle of Margalit wine.

Q:  How do you feel about synthetic corks or screwcaps versus natural corks?

A:  I am in favor. Most of the wines the world produces are cheap and good wines that have no aging potential—oxidation is not good for them. Therefore, they don’t need natural corks. In fact, screwcaps are better. They are 100 percent sealed, and they are 100 percent homogenous, cheaper and don’t have TCA.

For good wines with aging potential, I prefer natural corks because micro-oxidation is good for them. It matures them, but there is only a small portion of wines that are made for aging.

Tweet This Post